Choosing and playing streams from Digitally Imported, RockRadio, and more in the terminal.

About two years ago, I tweaked up a little utility to be able to listen to (ad-supported) Digitally Imported streams in the console. Unfortunately, the way the public streams were advertised is gone, which means that you’re stuck listening in the browser or app unless you pay for a subscription.

But I realized that a Digitally Imported subscription pays for multiple streaming services – including classical, rock, jazz, and more. (RadioTunes.com has it all). I prefer the curated streams to Pandora or Spotify, especially when you’re listening to music that’s not Top 40, so it was totally worth paying for.

But I still had the issue of having to use the website, or downloading a bunch of PLS files. So I decided to dust off my script to listen to Digitally Imported in the console, update it to be accessible to paying members (like me), and share it with you all.

There is one finicky configuration bit: Go to the Settings area on any of those websites, then to Player Settings, then to Listen Key.  Get that number and put it in a specific file for the script (see the README).

Because we are just scraping the public web page (like a browser), using the exact same stream we would be using with any other external player, and using a valid listen key, we’re well within the ToS and providing extra functionality (in that we can easily select any station on the site) to us.