fIcy: Streaming at the console

I’ve run across a lot of music players that can pull audio streams off the Internet. Saving them to a file is a little different.

Enter fIcy, and its supplementary program fPls.

It took me a little while to get these two to behave how I expected they should. Running fPls without an output redirect splattered junk all over the screen. The -o options in the help pages seemed to make it stall.

But a simple greater-than symbol dumped it into a file, which in turn worked perfect in mocp or ocp or mpg123 or what-have-you.

fIcy in turn seemed to work better that way too.

I very rarely need a tool to copy a stream into a file, but I can see where this would be useful if you listen to regular broadcasts or streams that aren’t prepackaged into downloadable chunks.

I didn’t see this in Arch’s repositories or AUR, and Debian’s package search comes up empty-handed.

The source file package comes with a Makefile, so it’s fairly easy to compile on your own.

Edit, 2014-11-02: I got a little coaching from wavexx (an fIcy maintainer) and fIcy seems to be working for me now. It’s been a while since I wrote this so I’m not sure what my problem was the first time, but wavexx helped me iron it out. 🙂