Luca Bruno blog

The less consuming radio player ever

Hello,
multimedia always killed desktop performance, also audio with all such effect-based players out there. I’ve been using deezer for a long time, but sometimes I’m tired to see my desktop lagging.
I don’t need that, I need random music from internet while I’m either programming or studying, and my computer has only 512mb ram and 2.4ghz amd64 (onLY??? yes nowadays it’s a little amount).

Let’s see what we can do using gst-launch:

  
while \[ 1 \]; do wget -q -O - http://66.250.45.112:80/hard.ogg|gst-launch fdsrc fd=0 ! decodebin ! audioconvert ! alsasink; done  

The URL above is a hard rock station :) The while ensures re-connection. I think performances are great, 6% cpu and 2% ram.

But there’s yet a bettere solution (see comments):

  
mplayer http://66.250.45.112:80/hard.ogg