Terminal WCPE Using VLC

One of the pleasures of living in North Carolina is that we get WCPE on the radio. ²⁴⁄₇ classical with informed presenters and no ads (sort of). Of course you don’t have to live in North Carolina to enjoy it; they stream online. Here’s a quick and easy way to play it from your terminal during the workday:

brew install vlc
alias wcpe="vlc --quiet --intf dummy http://playerservices.streamtheworld.com/api/livestream-redirect/WCPE_FM.mp3"

The command line flags here tell VLC to launch with logging suppressed (--quiet) and to use a dummy interface (--intf dummy). This way you get a headless, terminal-only experience. Simple!

This is assuming you’re on OSX with brew, but from Windows using chocolatey it’s about as easy to get VLC installed and accessible from the terminal:

choco install vlc

Or on Linux:

sudo apt install vlc