As my FM radio just sounded painfully because of so much noise, I looked at my Raspberry Pi lying next to it and thought “would it work as a digital webradio?”.

So I went ahead and installed VLC player:

apt-get install vlc

Then I went to the website of the local radio station and downloaded the m3u-file to the 128 kbit/s MP3-stream. Then I opened the file in VLC and clicked Play.

And it works great! CPU usage is at about 40%, RAM at 70MB. Sound can be digitally transferred using HDMI or using the stereo jack.

By the way, you can change the audio output to the stereo jack like this:

sudo amixer cset numid=3 1

And to HDMI:

sudo amixer cset numid=3 2

Compared to normal standalone webradios, this is not even an expensive solution. Using the IO pins, one could add buttons to control it, add an IR receiver via USB to add an IR remote control. You could even control it over the web using your smartphone.

Power consumption of the raspberry pi is also okay for a webradio, even if you do not shut it down because booting takes too long. Maybe the XBMC distribution for the raspberry pi is even better for a usage like this.

Oh, there are so many cool usages for this board. I really need to build something cool out of it.