One of the best things about Linux is that a huge part of the things you do can be done through the terminal. The terminal is so versatile that you can even listen to the radio through it. Were you surprised?
In this article we will show you three radio players that you can use directly through the terminal.
1 – Using mplayer terminal radio player

MPlayer is a free and open-source media player software application that can run in the terminal. MPlayer can play a wide variety of media formats, namely any format supported by FFmpeg libraries, and can also save all streamed content to a file locally.
Key features:
- Can run in the terminal
- Physical media: CDs, DVDs, Video CDs, Blu-ray discs
- Container formats: 3GP, AVI, ASF, FLV, Matroska, MOV (QuickTime), MP4, NUT, Ogg, OGM, RealMedia, Bink
- Video formats: Cinepak, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV, Bink
- Audio formats: AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR, DTS, FLAC, Intel Music Coder, Monkey’s Audio, MP3, Musepack, RealAudio, Shorten, Speex, Vorbis, WMA, Bink
- Subtitle formats: AQTitle, ASS/SSA, CC, JACOsub, MicroDVD, MPsub, OGM, PJS, RT, Sami, SRT, SubViewer, VOBsub, VPlayer
- Image formats: BMP, JPEG, MNG, PCX, PTX, TGA, TIFF, SGI, Sun Raster
- Protocols: RTP, RTSP, HTTP, FTP, MMS, Netstream (mpst://), SMB, ffmpeg:// (Uses FFmpeg‘s protocol implementations)
You can check the official web site from: Here
# How to install mplayer in Ubuntu 21.04 Linux ?
sudo apt install -y mplayer
# How to use mplayer?
mplayer -prefer-ipv4 http://ip-to-listen:port
Code language: PHP (php)
2 – Using VLC as radio player from the command line

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
Key features:
- Can run as radio player in the terminal
- Plays all formats
- Advanced control
- MPEG (ES,PS,TS,PVA,MP3), AVI, ASF / WMV / WMA, MP4 / MOV / 3GP, OGG / OGM / Annodex, Matroska (MKV),
- Real, WAV (including DTS), Raw Audio: DTS, AAC, AC3/A52, Raw DV, FLAC, FLV (Flash), MXF, Nut, Standard MIDI /
- SMF, Creative™ Voice.
You can check the official web site from: Here
# How to install VLC media player in Ubuntu 21.04 Linux ?
sudo snap install vlc
# How to use VLC in the terminal?
cvlc http://ip-to-listen:port
Code language: PHP (php)
3 – Using Pyradio terminal radio player

Pyradio is a free and open source Python-based command line tool that allows you to play your favorite radio station online.
Key features:
- Lite
- Simple to use
- Simple to install
- Tons of features
You can check the official web site from: Here
# How to install pyradio media player in Ubuntu 21.04 Linux ?
sudo snap install pyradio
# How to use pyradio?
# To launch Pyradio, you need to switch from root to a regular user and run
pyradio --play
Code language: PHP (php)
Conclusion for radio players in the terminal
In this article we checked the three best online radio players for Linux terminal. If you know other good terminal players, please tell us in the comments bellow.
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