Radio Tray in Ubuntu Raring 13.04

I’ve had trouble with Radio Tray, my favorite Internet radio streamer since Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal. It’s light-weight, not doing anything unnecessary to a good radio experience. Radio Tray lives in the system tray and interfaces with the user through simple menus and dialogs.

However, starting with Quantal, Radio Tray became problematic on launch. Sometimes it would crash two or three times before finally running. Once running, no problems. Strange, but just annoying. Under Raring 13.04, though, Radio Tray would load into memory most of the time, but never displayed in the system tray. Ever. Beyond annoying.

After researching the Net for ideas, I found no real answers except a reference to a buffer setting. When I ran Radio Tray from the terminal, one of the message lines referred to the lack of a buffer setting. So, I opened Radio Tray’s config.xml file at ~[user]/.local/share/RadioTray/ and poked around. I found three interface modes offered: systray, appindicator, and chooser. I had “systray” set, so changed it to “appindicator”. Then I changed the two appindicator settings from ‘false’ to ‘true’. After adding a generous buffer, I had the following configuration file:

Warning: Syntax counts in the config file. Running from the terminal can be your friend.

Those changes worked perfectly. Radio Tray is back in my system tray happily playing some great Bebop. All is right with the world again.