Bassdrive Radio addon for VLC

I have been listening to Bassdrive Radio almost daily for over 10 years now. It’s a worldwide drum and bass radio, but it’s aired from the USA which means that usually when I’m active they are airing reruns, so I listen to the shows in the archive instead. I didn’t want to have a browser tab open for it and I wanted a bit better UI. I decided to build a VLC addon for that.

VLC addons

VLC has a lua API for addons. Basically you need to drop a lua (or compiled luac) file to a specific directory and VLC will load the addon next time it starts. The addons allow you to extend VLC functionality in multiple (limited) ways. For my purpose it seemed that a “Service Discovery” addon was needed.

What I wanted the addon to do is to allow me to choose any show from the Bassdrive Archive or the live stream when I open VLC. Initially I though that I will scrape the archive HTML and build the archive, but it was very slow, so I quickly decided to have another layer between the archive and the addon: an API.

Bassdrive API

Since I was mainly programming in Dart during that time I decided to build the scraper/API builder in that. Basically what it does is:

• Using GitHub Actions, scheduled to run every hour
• Scrape the Bassdrive Archive and build a JSON tree from the shows
• Publish the JSON tree as a file in GitHub Pages

Since the archive does not update that often, having it running once per hour is more than enough. The actual published API is available here.

VLC Bassdrive addon

The addon itself is pretty simple: it fetches the JSON file from the API and builds a menu from the tree. It still takes some time though so I hardcoded the live URL in case I want to start listening to it straight away.

local json = nil
local dayOrder = {'Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saturday', 'Sunday'}

function descriptor()
    	return { title = "Bassdrive Radio", capabilities = {} }
end

function indexOf(array, value)
    for i, v in ipairs(array) do
        if v == value then
            return i
        end
    end
    return nil
end

function daysort(a, b)
	return indexOf(dayOrder, a) < indexOf(dayOrder, b)
end

function pairsByKeys (t, f)
      local a = {}
      for n in pairs(t) do table.insert(a, n) end
      table.sort(a, f)
      local i = 0      -- iterator variable
      local iter = function ()   -- iterator function
        i = i + 1
        if a[i] == nil then return nil
        else return a[i], t[a[i]]
        end
      end
      return iter
end

function main()
	lazy_load()
	local live = "https://bassdrive.radioca.st/stream"; --parsed['live']; Live URL doesn't change so hardcode it to make it load faster

	vlc.sd.add_item({path=live, title='Live'})
	
	local parsed, _, err = parse_json('https://bd.maido.io/api.json')

	if err ~= nil then
        	vlc.msg.err("Error to parse JSON response: " .. err)
        	return
        end

	for dayName, day in pairsByKeys(parsed['archive'], daysort) do
		local dayNode = vlc.sd.add_node( {title=dayName} )
		for _, show in ipairs(day['shows']) do
			local showNode = dayNode:add_subnode({title=show['name']})
			for _, episode in ipairs(show['episodes']) do
				showNode:add_subitem({path=episode['encodedUrl'], title=episode['name']})
			end
		end
	end
end


function lazy_load()
	if json ~= nil then return nil end
	json = require("dkjson")
end

function parse_json(url)
    local stream = vlc.stream(url)
    local string = ""
    local line   = ""

    if not stream then
        return nil, nil, "Failed creating VLC stream"
    end


    while true do
        line = stream:readline()
        if not line then
            break
        end

        string = string .. line
    end

    if string == "" then
        return nil, nil, "Got empty response from server."
    end

    return json.decode(string)
end

function log(msg)
    vlc.msg.dbg( "[BASSDRIVE] " .. msg )
end

And here’s how it looks like:

Install

To install, copy the script to the following location:

• Windows (all users): %ProgramFiles%\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\
• Windows (current user): %APPDATA%\VLC\lua\
• Linux (all users): /usr/lib/vlc/lua/
• Linux (current user): ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/
• Mac OS X (all users): /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/
• Mac OS X (current user): /Users/%your_name%/Library/Application Support/org.videolan.vlc/lua/