Rhythmbox - adding (UK Based) radio stations in bulk

Having been forced to stick my ear buds in so that I could watch a film whilst certain inconsiderate members of my household want to sleep during un-sleepable hours (yes, insomnia has caused me to basically live the life of a vampire), they're now not connected to my smartphone, and I like to have the radio on whilst I work.

Looking through the Launcher, I stumbled across Rhythmbox in Gnomes Sound & Vision category. Its a nice simple interface - but sadly the list of UK based stations is limited (if any) - I'm sure I've been able to add a bunch of stations to these sorts of apps in days gone by, although it's been a while (predating spotify for one! Winamp you could add a bunch of stations, via .m3u - or the URL equivalent of said m3u playlist - aggregation)

I cannot find a way to add Radio stations in bulk, and the shoutcast/streaming sites with lists of stations are all instructing me:

• It's so simple, click add, and paste this URL. Remember to hit like, and subscribe. And if you like another, you can add that too! Just press add for each station you like! It's so simple.

No, it's not. Its ANNOYING - you've got a list, let me add it all! Then I can see which ones I actually like. I ain't cut n pasting all your darn URLs, and I'm not listening to each one first to see if I like it, because you're going to hit me with 30 seconds of adverts before I get to hear whether I like your podcast or choice of music. If this is what I have to do, then it looks like I'm limited to anything BBC (no ads, means I can decide quickly if I want it).

Anyone know if this is possible in Rhythmnbox, or if there is a file-format that it will let me add that allows this functionality? As a last resort, I will take a text-based list of URLs that I can cut-n-paste from & into, and save being slapped about by adverts that are increasingly circumventing my ad blocker(s)

What I am hoping for

is for one of you geniuses to tell me that Rhythmbox actually contains all the radio streams/URLs in a text file, CSV file or some easily accessible sqlite jobby and automating the bulk addition of many addresses all at once is as simple as running (I don't even mind writing it) a script to automate the process!!

Writing scripts is fun. Even if it takes me a bit longer than it would to manually cut n paste 100 stations into the dialog box and press add, rinse repeat. Writing scripts is FUN FUN FUN! Boring repetitive actions over and over (especially more than 10 of them) are NOT FUN.

Sure, I was hoping for a script or tool that turns my text file collection into something compatible with Rhythmbox (and hopefully, for whatever player I happen to start using next)

But I think I found the finished article for adding a whole bunch of radio stations, streams; one for Radiotray as well as Rhythmbox. Someone has gone to the trouble of producing a 4,800 station-long XML file, a whole host pre-entered radio stations for all genres and tastes, and not just limited to the good ol' US of A like most tools you may find.

The Ultimate List of Radio Stations Seems to be exactly what I was looking to produce. Granted, its not a scrpt that would have automated turning my text file into Rhythmbox XML,. A GUI for added bells and whistles would have been great, but I would have been happy with a shell script.

But having a finished XML is cutting out that middle man, and if I have to delete some pap I don't want, so be it. I've saved some time by searching around.

One thing to note, turn on hidden files, since he has archived up the whole tree ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml

Ultimate List of Radio Stations

From gnome-look.org

Here's his blurb, the first paragraph could even have been written by me, its so close to the problem I describe in my first post:

I've always had a difficult time finding a bunch of various Internet stations, and whenever I do, I always had to manually install each and every one of them. Well, after a long while of doing just that, and accumulating quite a few, I decided to share.

There are nearly 4800 stations included here, of all types and genres of music and radio. So, I'm sure there is something for everyone.

The icing on his delicious cake?

And for those who use Radiotray and/or Rhythmbox, I've already included a version of the station list which is in the appropriate format/file for those programs.