I thought I would share another of my trial and errors to manage and play Radio1 on my PC.
Why not just tune in on the radio I hear you say well, I no longer live in the UK, but miss Radio 1 so much I had to find a way to listen to it from the other side of the world.
I have never been a huge fan of mplayer, not sure why maybe it's because everyone raves about it so much, so I tended to use vlc instead, but vlc is a gui application and I am trying so hard to use command line when I can I just had to figure it out, I realised shortly that perhaps mplayer is pretty good, after all I now use it everyday to listen to the Radio.
Biggest problem is Radio1 insist on playing the music through the iplayer using flash this not not good for us on linux, after many hours of googling I discovered the best kept secret of where to find the Radio1 streams in ram format, and best bit is mplayer does a great job at playing them.
Getting Radio on your computer
First off make sure you have mplayer installed. If not use:
# apt-get install mplayer
or use synaptic what ever floats your boat. 
Next go to this site and find the stream you wish to listen too.
iplayerconvertor
Find the program you would like to listen too such as Radio 1 Chart Show, 26/07/2009
On the right is the link to the stream it's called something like b00lsltb, you need to copy or make a note of the url and then substitute for following command:
# mplayer "-playlist" http://www.iplayerconverter.co.uk/pid/b00lsltb/stream.aspx
mplayer will start to buffer the stream and by magic it will start to play.
To kill the stream use ctrl + c
You may wish that the stream runs constantly in the background, in that case run it as,
# nohup mplayer "-playlist" http://www.iplayerconverter.co.uk/pid/b00lsltb/stream.aspx &
Keep an eye on the nohup.out file in your current dir as it can grow large if left for a long time.
If you want to listen to Radio1 LIVE then use the following:
# mplayer "-playlist" http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/realaudio/media/r1live.ram
Recording the stream
To record the Radio stream use the following command it will start the stream and save it, you will need to convert it to mp3 if you then want it on your mp3 player.
mplayer -dumpstream "-playlist" http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/realaudio/media/r1live.ram -dumpfile Radio1.dump -vc dummy -vo null
Controlling the volume
I found I had no way to control the volume so I used a package called aumix.
# apt-get install aumix
This program allows you to change the volume by a command line interface and the cursor keys it's nice small and does the job.I will be trying to get some other method to control the volume using hotkeys but at this time the above method works.
