Shortwave 3.0 Internet Radio released

A few weeks ago, Shortwave 3.0, a new version of Felix Häcker’s Internet radio application, which has been in development since 2018, was released. Shortwave was preceded by the Gradio . Installed on two devices, the new version worked immediately on a notebook, but refused to work on the desktop. So I put a news on it until I found the bug. This morning I tried again and lo and behold, it worked right away. So much for ‘finding bugs’.

The world in one app

I’ve liked Shortwave for a long time because it gives access to over 30,000 radio stations on the Internet and it also works perfectly on my Librem 5 and PinePhone. Shortwave accesses the stations via the API of the open source database radio-browser.info , which brings together stations from over 200 countries.

N ew and for various reasons radio-browser.info listen to them via Shortwave. The interface now uses the Adwaita theme and supports the global GNOME 42 dark mode. In addition, the application adapts to the form factor on Linux phones thanks to libadwaita .

More information

With v3.0, the display of the available bit rates of the individual stations can also be used as a sorting option. The transmitter data of the stations will also be stored on the hard drive in the future, so that they are still available even if a transmitter is removed from the online database. A new button on the search page allows for further sorting of the search results, while a revised sender dialog offers a clearer presentation of the information.

The desktop notification for song changes now only updates the display instead of generating a new separate notification for each song. In addition, Shortwave can now be used normally, even if radio-browser.info is offline or not available at the moment. In addition, errors have been eliminated and translations for 31 languages ​​have been updated.

Shortwave is not in the archive in many distributions and is only always up-to-date in the Arch Linux AUR. If you don’t want to build the app yourself , you can install it as a Flatpak via Flathub.