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dablin

Lightweight DAB receiver for the command line or a small window

What it does

Plays DAB and DAB+ from an ensemble, either as a command-line tool taking a transport stream on standard input or as a small GTK window with a service list. It does the decoding and leaves the tuning to something else -- typically eti-cmdline or a file captured earlier.

Why you would want it

It is the Unix answer to DAB: a decoder in a pipe, which is what you want for a headless receiver, an automated recording, or a stream fed to something else. welle.io is the program to look at; this is the one to script.

Before it will work

An ETI stream from somewhere -- a tuner tool, or a recorded file. That separation is the design and it is the thing that confuses first-time users, who expect it to open a dongle itself.

How it installs

  • apt: dablin

Known problems

It does not tune. Running it with no input produces nothing and no explanation, and the missing piece is the ETI source rather than anything in this package. Regional DAB coverage applies as with welle.io.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: apt_upgrade

Where to get help with the software itself

The Open Digital Radio project, which also produces the ODR transmit toolchain. Debian declares opendigitalradio.org as the Homepage; that host has a DNS record and answered nothing on either http or https when checked on 2026-08-28, so the repository is cited instead. It is live -- head of the default branch is 96ae480f7ff6, 2025-10-01, read from the branch rather than from GitHub's updated_at (D-032).

Source: catalog/packages/dablin.yaml