✦ DriftFM ✦

A cyber-synthwave internet radio player for your terminal.

Stream any radio station on Earth. Record tracks automatically. Never leave the command line.

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What is DriftFM?

DriftFM is a terminal internet radio player with a retrowave soul, built in Rust. It works like any radio — tune in, listen, discover — but it lives entirely in your terminal, starts instantly, and uses a few megabytes of RAM.

It ships pre-loaded with handpicked synthwave, chiptune, and cyberpunk stations so it sounds great from the first keypress. But you can search, save, and play any public internet radio station in the world.

Think of it as: VLC for internet radio, but it fits in your terminal and records tracks into named folders automatically.

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What makes it different?

Most TUI radio players just wrap ffplay. DriftFM is purpose-built from scratch in Rust with features you'd otherwise only find in native desktop apps:

• 📡 Search 30,000+ stations from the global radio-browser.info catalog — by name, tag, or country
• 📼 Automatic track recording — press r and it captures tracks as separate files, named Artist - Title.mp3, tagged with ID3 metadata, sorted into genre subfolders
• 🧹 Smart ad filtering — DJ speech, news breaks, and commercial spots are detected and silently discarded. Only real music is kept.
• 🔊 Smooth tuning transitions — switching stations fades out the current stream and fades in the new one, like turning an analog dial
• 🎨 5 built-in themes — Retrowave (default), plus all 4 Catppuccin flavors (Mocha, Macchiato, Frappé, Latte). Switch live in settings.
• 💾 Favorites & history — your stations are remembered between sessions, and the last-played station can auto-resume on launch
• 🔔 Desktop notifications — a silent system notification shows the current track when a new song starts
• 🎛️ Resilient streaming — a circular buffer absorbs network hiccups so your audio doesn't cut out when the connection stutters

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Installation

Prerequisites: Rust & Cargo (1.75+)

On Linux, also install ALSA dev headers first:

sudo apt-get install libasound2-dev   # Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dnf install alsa-lib-devel       # Fedora

From crates.io (recommended)

cargo install driftfm

From source

git clone https://github.com/milgaj84/driftFM.git
cd driftFM
cargo run --release

That's it. No config files to write. No API keys. Stations are pre-loaded and the player starts immediately.

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How to use it

DriftFM is keyboard-driven. Press h at any time to see the full control reference.

The most important keys to get started:

Key	What it does
↑ / ↓	Move between stations
Enter	Play selected station
Tab	Switch genre categories
/	Search for any station worldwide
Space	Pause / Resume
r	Start / stop recording
f	In search: add to library. In library: remove station
,	Open settings
q	Quit

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Workflow

Finding and adding a new station:

1. Press / to open search, type a genre, city, or station name — results come from the radio-browser.info catalog of 30,000+ stations worldwide
2. Use ↑ / ↓ to browse results
3. Press Enter to tune in instantly — this also automatically adds the station to your library so it's there next time
4. Alternatively, press f on a search result to save it to your library without playing it yet

Managing your library:

• Your library is the main station list you see on launch
• To remove a station, highlight it in the main list and press f
• Switch between genre categories with Tab / Shift+Tab to browse the pre-loaded catalog

Coming back tomorrow:

• DriftFM remembers your library between sessions
• Enable Auto-resume last station in settings (,) and it starts playing where you left off automatically

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Recording

Press r while a station is playing. DriftFM will:

1. Wait for the next song boundary (so you never capture a partial intro)
2. Record each track to its own file in the native stream format — recordings/Synthwave/Perturbator - Venger.mp3 or .aac depending on what the station broadcasts. No transcoding, no quality loss.
3. Embed the correct ID3 tags (artist, title, station name as album)
4. Discard anything under 90 seconds — DJ speech, ads, station IDs are swept automatically
5. Stop cleanly when you press r again

The minimum song duration and whether to keep short clips are configurable in the settings (,).

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Settings

Press , to open the settings panel. Current options:

• Desktop notifications — show track info when a song changes
• Auto-resume last station on startup — picks up where you left off
• Tape capture folder — cycle between preset recording directories
• Keep partial snippets & ads — whether short clips and non-music segments are kept or silently deleted
• Min song duration — threshold for auto-discarding short recordings (30s–180s). Only active when snippets filtering is ON.
• Theme — cycle between Retrowave, Catppuccin Mocha, Macchiato, Frappé, and Latte

Settings are saved automatically to a JSON file in your config directory.

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Platform Support

Platform	Status
Windows	✅ Full support (native WASAPI audio)
Linux	✅ Full support (ALSA)
macOS	✅ Full support (CoreAudio)

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Built with

All native Rust — no ffmpeg, no Python, no Electron. A single self-contained binary.

• Ratatui — Terminal UI framework
• Rodio + Symphonia — Audio decoding & playback (native, no ffmpeg dependency)
• Tokio — Async runtime for API search
• reqwest — HTTP streaming with ICY metadata support
• id3 — ID3 tag injection into recorded files

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License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.