qtradio Files

		QtRadio

This application is under GNU GPL License, for details see COPYING
Copyright(C) 2004 Pawel Pustelnik
Copyright(C) 2013 Oleh Nykyforchyn


This application lets you listen to FM radio using Video4Linux2 and
OSS drivers (or OSS emulation by ALSA) for setting volume and recording.
Automatic scanning for stations and manual editing of station list
are possible.

Note that there was a 10-year pause in development of QtRadio - it
simply compiled and worked until Qt3 library and Video4Linux v.1 are
declared obsolete and dropped in major Linux distributions. Now it
is almost completely rewritten to use Qt4 + Video4Linux2, to clarify
the structure, and to provide the most possible convenience for a user.
Nevertheless, appearance is mostly unchanged. The only visible change
is the introduction of cyrillic into LED font for main panel, with all
chars of Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarussian languages.

The program now has reached "works for me" stage and no obvious bugs
are observed (except for legacy docking code, which does not always
work as expected - improvements are welcome). Hence we expect that QtRadio
will be used without problems by those people who still own FM cards or
TV tuners with FM support.

Obviously, there may be (and surely are) bugs. If something goes wrong,
type "qtradio" in xterm or konsole - it writes a lot to console, which may
help. If You encountered a problem and, probably, know a solution, please
write us to make QtRadio better.

Installation is simple and relies on qmake from Qt suite. Default
installation root is /usr/local, but You can edit config.pri to put
the shared files, e.g., into /usr or /opt. To change location of qtradio
binary, edit src.pro. See INSTALL for more details.

If You do not want to compile QtRadio yourself, You may use the supplied
Slackware package, which is simply a tar.gz archive relative to /. Even
on other distributions, chances are good that You may simply unpack it
in the root directory and run /usr/local/bin/qtradio (You should only
delete /install directory with the file "slack-desc" which are specific
to Slackware).

The most important settings You must choose to run the program are radio
device (to listen), audio device (to record), mixer device and main mixer
channel. QtRadio tries to initialize first available devices of, resp.,
/dev/radio, /dev/dsp or /dev/audio, and /dev/mixer, with, possibly,
digits 0, 1, or 2 added, and "line" channel. If default settings do not
work, other devices can be chosen via "Settings" dialog. For example,
I (O.N.) ended up with /dev/radio0 (the unique radio device in the system),
/dev/dsp2 (DSP of the second audio card), /dev/mixer and "line1" (i.e.,
input of internal audio mini-jack, to which a cable from tuner goes). If
QtRadio cannot find devices, check whether You have read/write access to
them. Probably, You should belong to groups "audio", "sound", "video" etc.

Don't forget to "Save" settings after modifications! Note that "Recording"
settings come into effect only when recording is started, and are saved
via "Save" button in "Settings" dialog (otherwise they are forgotten).

If radio and mixer devices are chosen, You can start scanning for
stations. When it is completed, You will have a list of "Unknown" entries.
Probably, there will be multiple entries for a station. Choose the one with
the best quality, and delete worse ones. When a station is identified,
You will give it a meaningful name. Unfortunately, no RDS info yet (and
we don't know whether current Linux drivers offer such a possibility).

All personal settings are kept in ~/.qtradio directory. The files there
are human-readable, and may be edited manually provided qtradio is not
running and You understand what You are doing. In particular, font sizes
and families for all menus and dialogs can be set in "fonts" file, which
is created after the first run. As a last resort, You can delete any
config file and it will be recreated with default settings.

QtRadio needs a skin to work. There are some legacy skins, in the sources,
which differ only in foreground colour :) . The default one is installed
in /usr/local/share/QtRadio/Skin/Red. Each skin directory contains the same
set of files, namely a file "description" that contains basic information
about the widgets, and a collection of bitmaps. If QtRadio cannot detect
a skin, it will not run!

We think that "description" file is clearly written and you also can
create Your own skin. Probably You will need to look at the sources and
at the layout of the provided bitmaps to figure out which regions of
images go to which parts of the interface. To create a homebrew skin, You
can copy a standard one to ~/.qtradio/Skins/[WhateverNameYouWant] as
a starting point, and change it step by step. If You enable it via
"Options" dialog, it will be loaded after next switching power on. If You
have succeeded in this fine art, send us a result, and we will include it
into QtRadio tarball. QtRadio also needs a better icon.

QtRadio supports several languages: Polish, English, Ukrainian, Dutch.
To create a new translation, add "qtradio.XX.ts" (here XX is the two-letter
code of Your language) to the string "TRANSLATIONS = ..." in "src.pro",
and run "lupdate src.pro" inside "src" subdirectory of the sources.
The obtained file "qtradio.XX.ts" can be edited and compiled by Qt Linguist
to "qtradio.XX.qm". Then You just put the latter file into
/usr/local/share/QtRadio/Languages. Please also send us the edited
"qtradio.XX.ts" to include it into QtRadio.

Write us also about Your impressions and suggestions!


Have fun,
13-02-2014  Pawel Pustelnik  : pawelpus@wp.pl (primary author)
            Oleh Nykyforchyn : oleh.nyk@gmail.com (current maintainer)