You don't need to start resource-hungry multimedia applications to get a bit of Internet radio. Some command-line programs on Linux can play streams off radio stations. And, a simple shell script is quite enough as a wrapper to manage Internet radio stations easily or to download streams and then play them at your leisure.

The core of the script is a module from the FFmpeg suite [1], which also includes FFplay along with FFmpeg, FFprobe, and FFserver.

FFplay lets you easily enjoy a web station on the command line (Figure 1). For example, the following command is all you need to play the WABC radio station from New York:

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