GaGa is a very lightweight, simple online radio player that runs as an icon on the Windows tray. It's similar to RadioTray for Linux. Here is a screenshot:
Left click on the icon toggles play/stop. Middle click (with the mouse wheel) toggles mute. Right click opens the menu with a list of streams. The icon reflects the current state (e.g. an animation while buffering).
On a modern system, GaGa typically uses about 15 MB of ram and 1% CPU while playing. It supports .m3u, .asx, .mp3 and basically everything that Windows Media Player supports.
GaGa is designed to make it convenient to add, move or share radio stations between users. Unlike most other software, in which the user adds streams one by one in a GUI, GaGa uses an INI file. This file is automatically reloaded on changes and clicking "Edit streams file" opens it in your default editor for the .ini extension.
Here is an example. The "Radio Reddit" submenu in the screenshot above looks like this in the streams file:
[Radio Reddit]
Main = http://cdn.audiopump.co/radioreddit/main_mp3_128k
Electronic = http://cdn.audiopump.co/radioreddit/electronic_mp3_128k
Indie = http://cdn.audiopump.co/radioreddit/indie_mp3_128k
Hiphop = http://cdn.audiopump.co/radioreddit/hiphop_mp3_128k
Metal = http://cdn.audiopump.co/radioreddit/metal_mp3_128k
Rock = http://cdn.audiopump.co/radioreddit/rock_mp3_128kIt is possible to create arbitrarily nested submenus using a separator in the section name. Here is another example:
[Videogames/Oldies]
Kohina = http://kohina.radio.ethz.ch/kohina.mp3
[Videogames]
A.I. Radio = http://ai-radio.org/radio.mp3.m3u
NoLife = http://nolife-radio.com/radio/NoLife-radio.m3uWhich produces the following menu:
Scared of mistakes? Don't worry, GaGa will load an alternate menu with error details (including exact line) on any error. In the worst-case scenario, if you delete your streams.ini file, GaGa will recreate it with a list of default radio streams.
Performance-wise, streams file reloading is usually instant or takes milliseconds, even with hundreds of radio stations defined.
Building GaGa is a matter of opening the included Visual Studio 2010 solution and clicking the build button (or using msbuild). The source code has no dependencies other than the .NET Framework 4.0+.
There are binaries for the latest version in the Releases tab above.
GaGa doesn't need to be installed. It can run from any folder and doesn't write to the Windows registry. It's possible to run it from an usb stick provided the .NET Framework is available on the target machine.
GaGa only includes the Jamendo radio stations in the default ini. Here are some places with tons of radio stations, classified by genre or by country:
GaGa is tested on Windows 7 and 8, using the .NET Framework 4.0+. Mono is not supported, because it doesn't implement MediaPlayer (in PresentationCore) which GaGa uses for playback.
The streams file encoding is UTF-8 with or without a BOM signature. Notepad will work, although I suggest something better such as Notepad2 or Sublime Text.
There are no known bugs in GaGa. I may still add new features. Nice things to have would be .pls format support, being able to change the streams file location (or support per-user files) and global hotkeys (using multimedia keys). Contributions and ideas are welcome, as are bug reports.
Like all my hobby projects, this is Free Software. See the Documentation folder for more information. No warranty though.