Live Free. Live Happy.

UPDATE: Songbird linux builds are available through contributed builds - http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Developer/Articles/Builds/Contributed_Builds

Long back, when I was in IIIT, I used a small player known as Nitin's online radio player (runs only on Windows) which used to sit in the system tray and play online streaming radio channels. It had a small pop-up to switch between radio channels and was one of my favourite sources for listening to music. Six years later, I again wanted to have a similar radio but something which runs in Linux. My search revealed several players which supported this. But the best among them turned out to be mozilla based cross-platform Songbird with its Shoutcast Plugin. Shoutcast Radio is a website which publishes the list of online servers which stream using the shoutcast protocol. Among the other linux players I explored were Amarok, RhythmBox, Banshee, streamtuner, Listen, Banshee, Exaile and MPD (with GMPC). But only Songbird's Shoutcast Plugin had all the options which I wanted such as viewing the current number of listens, browsing by genre and bookmarking the favourite station.

The only problem with Songbird is that it has recently announced that it will no longer support Linux. Nevertheless, an open source project Nightingale has already spun off which will continue to support Linux.