Shortwave

Shortwave is an internet radio player for the GNOME desktop, written entirely in Rust with GTK4 and libadwaita. It is the spiritual successor to Gradio, rewritten from scratch with a modern stack and a broader feature set. The app connects to the community-maintained radio-browser.info database, which indexes over 30,000 stations from around the world. Its adaptive libadwaita layout means it runs comfortably on both desktop and mobile Linux form factors.

Features

• Vast station library — Powered by radio-browser.info, giving access to 30,000+ stations across every genre and country with no account required.
• Song identification — Displays the currently playing track title and artist when the station broadcasts ICY metadata, acting as a live "now playing" display.
• Chromecast / Google Cast — Shortwave is a registered Google Cast application and can stream audio directly to any Cast-compatible speaker or TV on your local network.
• Station recording — Record the live stream of any station to a local audio file with a single click, saving programmes or music for offline listening.
• Offline library — Save favourite stations to a personal offline library so they remain accessible even without an internet connection to the discovery database.
• Sandboxed cover art loading — Album and station artwork is loaded via glycin, the same sandboxed image library used by GNOME's Loupe viewer, isolating image decoding from the main process.
• Adaptive UI — Built with libadwaita's responsive widgets; the layout reflows gracefully from widescreen desktop down to phone-sized displays (e.g. PinePhone, Librem 5).
• MPRIS support — Exposes a standard MPRIS2 interface so desktop environments, shell extensions, and Bluetooth headsets can control playback and display track info.
• Background playback — Continues playing when the window is closed, controllable from the system media controls.

Installation

The recommended install method on all Linux distributions is Flatpak from Flathub:

# Flatpak (all distributions)
flatpak install flathub de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave

Shortwave is also available through native package managers on several distributions:

# Arch Linux (AUR)
paru -S shortwave
# or
yay -S shortwave

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.shortwave

Pre-built packages for Debian and Fedora are not yet in the stable repositories; the Flatpak is the recommended path on those distributions.

Quick Start

Launch Shortwave from your application grid, or from the terminal:

# Launch via Flatpak
flatpak run de.haeckerfelix.Shortwave

On first launch the app opens the Discover view, which shows trending and popular stations from radio-browser.info. Use the search bar at the top to find stations by name, country, language, or tag.

# If installed natively
shortwave

To save a station to your library, click the star icon on any station card. Saved stations appear in the Library tab and are available offline. To start recording a stream, open the station's overflow menu and select Start Recording — the file is saved to ~/Music/ by default.

Chromecast Streaming

To cast to a Google Cast device, ensure your device is on the same local network, then:

1. Start playing any station.
2. Click the cast icon in the playback bar (bottom of the window).
3. Select your Cast device from the list.

Shortwave transfers the stream URL directly to the Cast device, so your computer is not in the audio path and can be closed without interrupting playback.

Shortwave vs Other GNOME Radio Apps

Gradio was the original app Shortwave replaced; it is no longer maintained and lacks the modern GTK4/libadwaita stack. Shortwave is the recommended successor for GNOME users wanting a dedicated radio experience.