Kodi/XBMC Streaming Radio, Intro
R Brown
So a Raspberry Pi can turn an analog TV into a digital TV, how about turning a TV into a streaming radio?
Sure, no problem. See how I did the analog to digital TV conversion here:
I'm mainly using my RPi/Kodi/TV as a radio in my shop area. I used to use a Sony radio/tape player but it had poor audio output so I needed to run powered speakers with it. That totaled up to 13-15 watts of power that was running 8-10 hours per day. On top of that, the radio was hard to get to and tune (no remote), so I pretty much stuck with one station.
Now, I have the RPi and TV running off of solar power. It has better audio output, a remote control and can get 1000s of radio stations plus TV and streaming video.
For playing audio streams, you'll need some sort of audio output capability. I used the analog stereo audio outputs from the Raspberry Pi, as shown in this video:
I suppose one might also be able to plug in a Bluetooth adapter into the RPi and then send audio to a wireless speaker. I'm not set up to test that and I have the TV's built-in audio amp and speakers to work with. Likewise, lacking a TV screen, you would plug in an LCD (touch) screen and use that for a user interface.
I only have used the Kodi add-on repository for this video series. There are more than 50 add-ons in that repo. under the Music add-ons category including the few that I installed.
Under the NPR add-on, there are dozens of stations per state for the US, not sure the total count. Under the Radio add-on, there are more than 7000 stations world-wide available, sorted by city, country and other criteria.
There is also a Pandora add-on that works with your personal channel information. I've also seen an I Heart Radio add-on, but have yet to get it to work on my RPi.
I'm quite sure if there's an audio stream available from someplace, there is likely an add-on in Kodi to receive and decode it for playback. The hardest part will be finding what add-on to use to access that particular stream.
In the next videos, I'll cover a few tips I found for setting up analog audio output from the Raspberry Pi:
Then I'll look at some of the other music/radio/audio-streaming add-ons to give a feel for what is available.
As always, thanks for watching! ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkUyZpsBtDA
125937926 Bytes