1. Introduction

QtRadio is an application that lets You listen to FM radio. Automatic scanning for stations and manual editing of station list are possible. Built in mixer is included, which can be used even if no FM radio device is present.

All You need is radio card (or TV with FM tuner) and a kernel driver. Your card must be supported under Linux and the driver should be Video4Linux2. All dependencies you can find in chapter 2: Dependencies.

A wide range of options can be set to fit Your needs the best. All personal settings are kept in ~/.qtradio directory. The files there are human-readable, and may be edited manually provided qtradio is not running and You undertand what You are doing. In particular, font sizes and families for all menus and dialogs can be set in fonts file, which is created after the first run. As a last resort, You can delete a config file and it will be recreated with default settings.

The software is in testing phase. In particular, docking does not always work as expected - improvements are welcome! In case You encounter a problem, run qtradio in xterm or konsole - it writes a lot to console, which may help.

QtRadio needs a skin to work. There are some legacy skins, in the sources, which differ only in foreground colour :) . The default one is installed in /usr/local/share/QtRadio/Skin/Red. Each skin directory contains the same set of files, namely a file description that contains basic information about the widgets, and a collection of bitmaps. If QtRadio cannot detect a skin, it will not run!

You can also create Your own skin. See chapter 5 : Own Skin.

QtRadio supports several languages (now English, Polish, Ukrainian and Dutch). For example, the file qtradio.pl.qm contains a translation of the interface to Polish language.

To create a new translation, add "qtradio.XX.ts" (here XX is the two-letter code of Your language) to the string TRANSLATIONS = ... in qtradio.pro, and run lupdate src.pro inside src subdirectory of the sources. The obtained file qtradio.XX.ts can be edited and compiled by Qt Linguist to qtradio.XX.qm. Then You just put the latter file into /usr/local/share/QtRadio/Languages.

All suggestions to Oleh Nykyforchyn : oleh.nyk@gmail.com.

2. Dependencies

Complete list of the dependencies:

Video4Linux2
LIRC 0.7.x - 0.9.0 [optional]
OSS drivers or ALSA OSS emulation (for mixer support)
Qt library : Qt 4.x or higher ( Tested with Qt 4.8 )
X11 library

3. Installation

To compile and install, just type:

installer.sh

and choose : "Disable LIRC" or "Enable LIRC". There are no errors usually. Alternatively, for installation with or without LIRC type:

qmake -config lirc main.pro
make
make install

or, respectively:

qmake main.pro
make
make install

For more details see INSTALL.

4. Using keys

You could do almost everything in QtRadio using your mouse, but, for you convenience, QtRadio uses keyboard shortcuts, which you can (re)define. Here are default settings:

P - Power On/Off

RIGHT_KEY - Next station

LEFT_KEY - Previous station

UP_KEY - Add 0.1 MHz to current frequency

DOWN_KEY - Sub 0.1 MHz to current frequency

SUB_KEY - Sub 0.01 MHz to current frequency

PLUS_KEY - Add 0.01 MHz to current frequency

K - Skins

L - Radio channels List

F1 - About

F2 - About Qt

S - Settings

PAGE_DOWN - Volume Down

PAGE_UP - Volume Up

CTRL + E - Exit QtRadio

5. Own Skin

If you want to create Your own skin, edit default config file "description" to set new pixmaps and specify geometry for interface components. Note that this file must look exactly like the default one looks. Thus: all keywords are uppercase, spacing (including whitespaces around "=" signs) must be preserved, as well as line order and empty lines.

For an example look at /usr/local/share/QtRadio/Skins/Red/description and other files in this directory.

Probably You will need to look at the sources and at the layout of the provided bitmaps to figure out which regions of images go to which parts of the interface.

To create a homebrew skin, You can copy a standard one to ~/.qtradio/Skins/[WhateverNameYouWant] as a starting point, and change it step by step. If You enable it via "Options" dialog, it will be loaded after next switching power on.

6. LIRC

QtRadio has supported LIRC since version 0.7.0.

Here is an example .lircrc. At least, it worked for Pawel Pustelnik :)

begin
prog = qtradio
button = RIGHT
config = freq up
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = LEFT
config = freq down
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = VOL_PLUS
config = volume up
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = VOL_MINUS
config = volume down
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = MUTE
config = mute
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = CHAN_PLUS
config = channel up
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = CHAN_MINUS
config = channel down
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = ENTER
config = quit
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = RETURN
config = seeking
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = CENTER
config = record
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = POWER
config = power
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = VIDEO
config = mouse mode
end
begin
prog = qtradio
button = REV
config = mixer
end

6. Thanks

There are few people who helped to create and maintain this application:

Mateusz Perlak : Admin of the former QtRadio page http://linux.perlak.com

Sandy Pleyte : Important suggestions , testing and translations

Bartlomiej Muryn : Important suggestions , testing

7. Authors

Pawel Pustelnik (primary author) : pawelpus@o2.pl
Oleh Nykyforchyn (current maintainer) : oleh.nyk@gmail.com