Listening to BBC Radio using Ubuntu

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Posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 9:42pm. #

So, you’ve junked that Windows box, but you still fancy listening to a little bit of BBC Radio? Don’t blame you.

Thanks to a man called Tim who wrote a series of amusing emails to a colleague of mine at the BBC, and a nice man called Richard who, and I quote, said “You’re a linux man, James, aren’t you?”, I’ve rushed home and discovered how to do it, so I could tell him. Here’s how. Tested on Ubuntu Gutsy, the latest version. And ready for my colleagues to copy’n'paste into a proper BBC web-page.

Open Synaptic
Synaptic is the software that will install Real Player for you.
- Run System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.
- Type your password when it asks you.

Tell Ubuntu where to find commercial software
Real Player is commercial software, so we need to tell Ubuntu how it can find that if we search for it.
- Under the ‘Settings’ menu, choose ‘Repositories’.
- Click the ‘Third party software’ tab.
- Click the ‘Add’ button at the bottom of the window.
- In the window that appears, type:
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu dapper-commercial main
- Then click ‘OK’ to enter that information, and ‘close’.
- A window will appear saying that the repositories have changed.
- Click ‘close’.
- Click the ‘reload’ button on the top-left of the toolbar.
- After a few seconds, it’ll load a few files.

Install Real Player
Now Synaptic will know all about commercial software, like Real Player. (Don’t worry, it’s still a free download).
- Hit the ’search’ icon in the toolbar, and search for “realplay”.
- You’ll see a few programs appear in the search results window. Tick the one called ‘realplay’ and choose “Mark for Installation”.
- Then press ‘Apply’ in the toolbar; then ‘apply’ again.
- Synaptic will automatically download a file (6 megabytes).
- Close Firefox while it’s doing this, so it can install correctly.
- Synaptic will automatically install Real Player onto your system.

Go to the iPlayer for Radio
- Open Firefox.
- Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/
- Click on “Listen live” for the station of your choice
- Enjoy the best the BBC has to offer.

Photo: Alosh Bennett. Used under licence

Tags: bbc, player, radio, real, realplayer, ubuntu | Permalink | Comments RSS | Leave a response, or trackback.

10 comments

Liam said at January 22nd, 2008 at 10:23pm

Another way (without Real Player) is to install SqueezeCenter from www.slimdevices.com and then install AlienBBC. Should work on various Linux distros, Windows, FreeBSD… I’ve got it running on FreeNAS.

If you don’t want to buy a Squeezebox hardware player, either use the Java SoftSqueeze or I’m using SqueezeSlave plus the ‘Moose’ windows front end.

It does rather more than just allow you to listen to the BBC. It will manage your whole music library and integrate with iTunes if you really want.

alf said at January 23rd, 2008 at 10:41am

The dapper-commercial repository is for an old version of Ubuntu. You can either use feisty-commercial or wait for RealPlayer to be added to gutsy-commercial (now called gutsy-partner, in fact). There are other alternatives, including getting the Linux installer from real.com, which is easy enough.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RealplayerInstallationMethods

William T said at January 23rd, 2008 at 11:24am

I guess you could use the open source Helix player as well? https://helixcommunity.org/

(at least I assume this is different from the one you’re talking about - I must confess to having found the free Helix *server* rather useful in the past..)

Chris Wyatt said at January 26th, 2008 at 12:32pm

Helix player doesn’t work sadly, I don’t think it’s licensed to play Real audio, even though Realplayer is based on Helix. Personally I installed one of the nightly builds from here:

http://forms.helixcommunity.org/helix/builds/?category=realplay-current

It seems stable enough to me, I’ve been using it for a while and have had no problems with stability. Sadly although installation is easy, there isn’t an easy way to uninstall it.

Nick said at February 7th, 2008 at 1:58am

I am running Ubuntu studio and have realplayer installed but still cannot get the embedded player to work. I get an error message “Could not find hxplay or realplay in the system path to use as an embedded player” I can play in an external player such as totem but am not able to accesss the Listen Again feature.

I am using a Compaq Pressario and my tech friend thinks it is a hardware problem or TCP.

Any help would be most welcome. It is the feature l miss most since switching from windows to linux.

luke said at March 16th, 2008 at 6:51pm

I’m also running Ubuntu and I’m unable to listen to BBC listen-again for radio

I have realplayer installed, but clicking on play button does nowt. I’ve also got the mplayer plugin installed… bit stuck.

Is it possible to just have the feed URLs to use in an external player??

iPlayer gets radio. Properly this time. - blog - James Cridland said at June 26th, 2008 at 11:12pm

[...] In Flash, finally. At a decent bitrate, finally. No Real Player required (good job, it’s a devil to install on this Ubuntu [...]

Mark said at July 1st, 2008 at 8:11am

I’m not in any way a hacker so I don’t know how good this method is, but rather than installing yet another media player I’ve made files

VLC can use;I’ve uploaded the files; You can download them from http://www.tupple.net/radio/ I’ve done BBC1,2,3 and 4 and open any of them with vlc. It sometimes takes a few seconds to connect.

Russ said at October 19th, 2008 at 8:45pm

As a linux newbie I messed around with Firefox and could not get to listen to radio channels via iplayer. In a fit of desperation I installed opera, despite a warning about using a browser that does not support plugins it works.

Brisbane web design said at October 26th, 2008 at 10:01pm

I still can’t believe how easy it is to get new software by using the command line. Thanks so much for your tutorial.

I’m really looking forward to this week’s release of Ubuntu.

A Stumble for your efforts :)

James.Cridland.net

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Listening to BBC Radio using Ubuntu

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