Radio Garden – Listen to world radio by navigating an interactive globe | Hacker News Reader

Radio Garden – Listen to world radio by navigating an interactive globe

radio.garden

527 pointsgamma_raj110 comments

Developer here. We weren't exactly expecting this to become as popular as it did.. Just survived being #1 on Reddit – sheesh.

It seems our non-profit Bing maps key was revoked.. Switched to Arcgis imagery instead for now. Too bad, the Bing imagery was really great.

How did you populate this map? I looked at the Transnational Radio Encounters dataset and didn't find a list of stations, let alone a link to their stream.

It actually looked pretty cool without the basemap.

Perhaps talk to MapBox? They might be amenable to giving you a few more map views.

Make it as an mobile app! Hard to use it as a tab in a browser on the phone, but app is amazing! it!

It appears that the way it decides where the dots should go, goes by the city name alone, and ignores the state.

In my case, I am in North Bend, WA. It shows the nearest station as KBBR:

http://radio.garden/live/north-bend/1340kbbr/

The problem is that it is actually physically located in North Bend, OR:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KBBR

I love this thing you've made. I've been exploring the world with radio since long before the WWW was invented. I used to carry a shortwave radio with me wherever I traveled back in the 1970s and 80s. I would lie there in the dark in Japan listening to the broadcasts out of North Korean screeching about the "Great Leader" (Kim Il-sung) or in Thailand listening to the Khmer Rouge (whom I couldn't understand, but I knew who controlled Cambodian broadcasts) or in the UK listening to Africans (not putting on a show for Americans but putting on a show for their own people) or on the East Coast of the US listening to callers to talk shows in the UK arguing about local issues. What do people there talk about amongst themselves? What do they like to listen to? What does such-and-such language sound like? I loved exploring the world this way.

My kids don't understand how magical the world is today--how they can do what cost me so much money and time and effort by doing nothing more than poking a few icons on their phones. These things don't mean much to them; they were born into a world where magic was just daily life.

But, things like this are still magical to me, even though I've been a developer for decades. Somehow, even knowing how the "tricks" are done, I still think it's magic. Just tonight, I fed YouTube into my HD TV and watched as someone walked around my old neighborhood in Tokyo with a 4K camera. Then again where I used to live in Seoul. And a couple of days ago, I found something for my father out in the desert a thousand miles from here by using Google Street View to "drive" down a remote highway, looking around until I found it. And now I can just spin the globe and point at a dot to hear a broadcast coming from that location. I've been listening to online broadcasts for 20 years using lists of online radio stations, but this is so much nicer.

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who sees all of this as real-world magic.

This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read on HN. Favourited your comment.

Not the only one - I agree. Actually I think Clarke's third law is wrong (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic):

Technology is magic. The reason why many people get uncomfortable when speaking of magic is that they think it's something otherworldly, and thus non-existent.

But magic is what we do, it's just a mystery for those who don't know the incantations and methods. That goes for technology as well as rhetoric, or medicine, or politics or what have you.

We even call it magical but it's somehow OK only if we don't really mean it. :-D

I'm with you - I can remember copying a tape of french punk music from my high school language teacher and how I found it so fascinating that there was this whole other music and cultural thing happening that I'd probably never have access to and now I click on this globe and it pops right up.

I also want to add what a terrific user experience this site provides. It's "technically" no different than a list of radio stations from around the world, but the presentation definitely makes it seem magical.

The next step will be AR/VR where I can hold a globe in the palm of my hand and spin and poke at it to get radio stations.

You are not alone. I've been online for over 30 years now, since the mid-1980s, and deeply involved in Internet technology. And yet I still find applications of that technology that are wonderfully magical. (This radio.garden is one of them!)

I agree - we are entering a realm of real-world magic. Just hoping that humanity can handle it.

Not alone! I'm more into TV though. I have international free streaming TV channels as bookmarks. Starting from DW to NHK World. These international TV channels give a glimpse into the culture, viewpoint of a country IMO.

It would be very nice to have similar interface for TV channels instead of sites like filmon.

Wow, I remember playing with a my grandfather's AM tube radio as a small kid, and this brought me right back to those days. Very, very cool.

Where are you getting the data? How do you find the stations and coordinates?

Great interface, well done!

Ubuntu 16.04: it works in Opera, doesn't work in FF (I'm probably blocking something vital with one of the various privacy add ons).

Android 6 tablet: it doesn't work in either the stock browser (updated yesterday) and Firefox.

Amazing work!

Suggestions:

- Let the radio keep playing while the user scrolls the map and until they click on a different spot.

- Run a kickstarter for creating a mobile app for this and getting a paid key to the Bing maps. Having the MVP already running I think it'll sell like candy!

- Labels for the stations, cities, etc. The UI should be great on this, so the user feels like traveling across the world! Maybe even include Google Street View? Not sure, just a thought..

Again, amazing work!

Great app!

One suggestion: add a volume control. It's far too loud even at minimum volume on my Macbook.

volume control works just fine on my macbook pro

I'm not seeing any volume control on the page, weird.

To be clear, of course my macbook volume control works, but even with that set at the minimum, the radio volume is punishingly loud (to these ears at least)

I actually like the Arcgis imagery better. It's easier to tell at a glance where I am in the world. Then again, I don't know if it was fully functioning when I saw the Bing imagery.

Hey, amazing project! Surfed over Eastern world radio stations for about an hour. Didn't found any convenient way to report bug, but currently Georgia (country, not state) is shown as "Tbilisi, United States".

It would be nice to have a search box option

If you're looking for some more radio geo-coords, here's a map of Indian radio stations:

http://www.communityvoices.in/directory/community-media-maps...

I love this! There are some missing stations in Norfolk, UK, Suffolk, UK and London, can I submit these? You are missing: Future Radio (107.8fm)(Norwich, Norfolk) Radio Caroline (DAB)(Norwich, Norfolk) North Norfolk Radio (96.2fm, 103.2fm)(Norwich, Norfolk) Norwich 99.9FM (99.9fm)(Norwich, Norfolk) Kiss 105-108 (Norfolk 106.1, Suffolk 106.4) TheBeach (103.4fm, 97.4fm)(Lowestoft, Suffolk & Gt. Yarmouth, Norfolk) Town 102 (102.0fm)(Ipswich, Suffolk) ICR FM (105.7fm)(Ipswich, Suffolk) Dream 100 (100.2fm)(Colchester/Clacton On-Sea, Essex) Magic (105.4fm, DAB)(London) Kiss100 (100.0fm, DAB)(London)

How can we get a missing radio station added?

Alex Two Lochs Radio www.2lr.co.uk

Radio Garden has been stuck on "Planting Radio Garden" (http://i.imgur.com/ncmxjrm.png) for a while now. Is this because of poor connection on my part, or is it le Reddit Hug of Death?

Amazing website, though.

edit: Apparently it's a Chrome problem. Works fine in Firefox. Cheers!

Oh man, this is so much fun. I'm listening to radio in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the male and female host are bickering about how winter is, in fact, NOT coming this year. And now they're playing John Mayer.

So much more perspective than just whatever the news media wants the narrative to be about some of these places. (And I've traveled plenty, but this is just a lovely taste of day-to-day for people on the other side of the planet, but fortunately in English!)

Amazing example of how good UI can make something so interesting and useful.

I have seen plenty of websites which lists the radio stations from all over the globe, but this interface makes it so much more interesting and fun.

Really well done to the devs.

Love the concept and simple design. Very cool. Resist those wanting land boundaries added; it will lose some mystery then.

Reminds me of that not-uncommon movie intro implying that aliens are listening to Earth, where the camera zooms in on the planet as random stations and static play.

Seconding leaving the boundaries out. What would be awesome though is day/night simulation!

Amazing product!

I was curious to know their source of stations; the history ones are coming from: http://www.transnationalradio.org/database#Search - which they have mentioned on their page as well.

LIVE ones are streaming directly from the streaming websites, further searching in their code and looking the URLs it seems its shoutcast.com API its the same thing I used a decade back with winamp! but as they didn't mention it anywhere I am not sure.

The way they presented it with map, history is simply great.

Worth mentioning, a somewhat similar project with more entropy: http://radioiss.com.

I love it in the background when working, for the dose of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect.

Two additional global radio places to explore:

global time machine with http://radiooooo.com/ and streaming with http://tunein.com/radio/regions/

TuneIn's app (at least on Android) has got worse and worse over the years. I think there's even ads in the "pro" version now that I paid for a while back. Also, why does a radio streamer need access to my contact list?

Thanks for radiooooo.com. I like it, although the URL is not so user friendly. :)

Fantastic app! (But I'm keeping my short wave radio anyway). Can't help but notice vast areas of radio deserts. I presume there are at least radio broadcasts there, but they don't stream?

What is the meaning of the size of the dots? I was guessing it's related to transmit power?

I think it represents the number of radio stations available for that city (each dot is a city, and you can switch individual radio stations using the list at the lower right corner of the screen)

> Can't help but notice vast areas of radio deserts. I presume there are at least radio broadcasts there, but they don't stream?

It's most likely missing data in the radio directory they are using - I know of 5+ streaming channels in 2 African countries, yet both countries are totally blank.

If you are into amateur radio, this [1] does something similar, allowing you to tune into amateur bands across the world in real time.

[1] http://websdr.org/

And it lets you listen to real radio, not streams, which will improve coverage outside of the US and Europe (found two streaming stations in Japan, neither of which work, and about a dozen in all of India)

One suggestion: maybe change the background to something black. Then it will feel more like the Earth is a part of cosmos - a context will be shown and will create a nicer feeling.

Cool! I even like the fake static and squelch... it reminds me of tuning the 80s era shortwave radio I found when I was a kid.

Brilliant concept and execution! I figured, it must be every station that has a live stream, but no, my nearest station, KZSU Stanford, has multiple streams and isn't there. And the list of presences in the one green dot in SF is much too short. So... what's the source?

As it appears to me (running Chrome on Linux) it's really hard to go looking for a particular location, since it's just dots on a solid blue browser tab. Is that by design? (Also, it shows stations in Madrid, Spain at a spot that I think is a bit west of Ames, Iowa.)

Thanks for the heads up on this – should be working again now.

From the you-can't-please-everyone dep't: in a weird way, the non-functioning map made the discovery process a little more fun. The map just started working for me–I didn't know that it was supposed to–and I was slightly disappointed.

Tho I support using satellite imagery and nothing more.

Brilliant site, and very well done. Thanks for putting it together and sharing it.

We are actually working on a game mode, which takes away the map and has you track down countries by listening to different radio stations.

There is a small town named Madrid just southwest of Ames, Iowa.

I love this! I love the static when tuning as well as how quickly it starts playing from each station. The only suggestion I have it to put political boundaries so it is easier to see where you're at.

On the contrary, I think adding political boundaries would remove some of the power of the concept.

Make it toggle. Then you can be magical or practical.

I'd like to have an overlay with borders and city names.

I just turned into an Australian DJ bitching about the fact that they get charged extra for online listeners, vs. over-the-air listeners.

Simply awesome. Ironically, I haven't had a radio in years and I don't own a car, but I found a local radio station I've never listened to before.

The designer's website is a trip too[0].

[0] http://puckey.studio/

That real time typing reminds me of chatting via direct modem connection to your friends. It gives a slightly better awareness of the person's feelings. Instant messengers now don't seem to do that, I guess the latency on the global internet is too high.

That webpage is painful to see 'till the end. Too slow.

Why are you using WebGL for this with no other option? I am using Chrome because it is infinitely faster than Firefox. I get the following message from your site:

    Error constructing CesiumWidget. Visit http://get.webgl.org to verify that your web browser and hardware support WebGL. Consider trying a different web browser or updating your video drivers. Detailed error information is below:

    RuntimeError: The browser supports WebGL, but initialization failed. Error at new t (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:13:1700) at new B (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:37:3393) at new ce (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:36:6010) at new e (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:32:898) at t.e.value (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:10:9355) at t.e.value (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:9:21370) at e.notifyAll (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:5:4913) at r.h.close (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:7:12663) at r.o.closeAll (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:5:8329) at r.o.perform (http://rg-60c3.kxcdn.com/bundle-792cb1b42393ce14840f.js:5:7818)

From `http://get.webgl.org` I get

    While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable.

I tried to enable WebGL and found that it was only experimental for application development:

    chrome://flags
    
    WebGL 2.0 Prototype Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android
    Enabling this option allows web applications to access the experimental WebGL 2.0 feature. This option should only be used for application development, and should not be used when browsing arbitrary web sites. #enable-unsafe-es3-apis

So I am required to enable something that is warned against just to be able to use a single site. Not exactly what I would consider user friendly…

Is an open source list of radio streams available, e.g. with URL/name/lat/long?

Good work

I see you host some broadcast segments (e.g. "jingles"). Do you have the rights to broadcast them, regarding copyright rules?

This is a project lead by several universities, maybe these audio segments are part of a public dataset?

This is awesome! I'm a mobile developer and I built an app similar in concept for iPhone a few months ago (except mine is way less robust and has wayyy fewer stations). Good work guys! Link to the app I built RadioAtlas: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/radioatlas-explore-world-thr...

How did they pick the stations? There are only two in Japan, one of which is playing "I've been Working on the Railroad" in Japanese.

Hi there! I work at a small radio station in Southeast Alaska (KCAW), which I see is on here, however it says station is unreachable. We just updated our stream url this week. Is that something I could give you to get us back up and running, or will it eventually find us again? Also, don't know if this is relevant, but in our update we changed from shoutcast to icecast. Thanks!

Here seems to be the stations in JSON format in case anyone wanted to extract them. There are about 12,000 but some of the stations at the end don't have a source. http://rgapi-60c3.kxcdn.com/live.json?b=89eae48362c03fe07fcc

The link shows 403 Forbidden!!

Has it been HN'ed or what?

Try this : http://rgapi-60c3.kxcdn.com/live.json?b=1c6525f1332a13762931...

I normally stalk YC, hardly comment. I have to say amazing product. Why dont you put it on product hunt?

Hi, This is great!! However there are several radios in Portugal that do not appear. One of them is Kul: Radio, from Castelo Branco. Can you add? http://proxima.shoutca.st:8232/stream

Thanks :)

Having a lot of trouble getting it to load. Congratulations on being so popular!

How do we get our community radio station on this map? I see that question has been asked here already but I can't find any answers.

Much appreciated, Sybil A., WORT Community Radio musicdirector (at) wortfm.org

Would love to try this but getting the following error

http://imgur.com/a/l4iqP

I'm running chrome 54.0.2840.100 (64-bit) in ubuntu 14.04 with nvidia proprietary drivers

Same here. I'm running Chrome 55.0.2883.87 (64-bit) on Mac 10.10.5.

London has a radio station for Bird songs [0]. Is this real?

[0]: http://radio.garden/live/london/birdsongradio/

Yes, Birdsong is real. It is used by Digital One on the national DAB network when a station is off air or under maintenance. As of right now, this station is not on air.

Operations Manager of a cluster of 10 stations in US. How does one get added to your amazing platform? All stations stream. You have one of our stations (KSCJ/Sioux City) already on. Love to add our others!

Is there a way to submit stations to this? My city doesn't have any stations listed, but I do know a couple have online streams that could be added to this. Thanks for the great work studiopuckey!

Sincere congratulations! This is the best thing I've seen in a while.

Great idea!

A few points for improvement:

- only change station if map is clicked on

- show station details on mouse hover

Beautiful! What a great ui for such use case! And it works perfectly on android huawei honor 7 (because somebody said it doesn't work well on smartphone!)

This is awesome. I tuned into an old Kingston rock stations for a bit of college nostalgia. Of course they'd be playing The Tragically Hip right then.

Great app. Is there a way to flag favorites. I think this will help fill time on my driving. But of course I don't want to tune and drive

Hey, hit us at Mapbox, let's get you back live again. Sales@mapbox.com, I'm Erin and I'll get a discount going for you.

Awesome creation dude well done, i m sharing it to all my frends in karnataka, Bengaluru Hats off to u and team. Truly Radio Garden

The static/tuning sounds never stop playing for me in Safari. It would be nice to have a button that completely turns it off.

Doesn't load on Firefox 50.0 for me on Windows 10. Any suggestions? Works fine on Windows Edge, BTW . . . .

I rarely comment, but this is awesome! :D

IE can't handle it. And Chrome doesn't play audio for me. Any ideas why Chrome would not play audio?

Crashed My WiFi hard drive and would Not disconnect to My Mac Laptop . Loved It till this Happened .

Gostaria de adicionar minha emissora.. Www.radiomanchetefm.com.br cidade planaltina Goiás obrigado

Crashed my WiFi hardware on Mac Computer - would Not disconnect even when shutting down window

bom dia eu queria adicionar minha radio se fosse possivel radio portugal fm regiao de paris (villejuif) http://94.23.214.38:9934 obg boas festas feliz natal e obrigado por exitir

Now someone should create a world map of Youtube live streams (akin to facebooks livemap)

Awesome! Thanks for sharing.. Can I ask what tech have you used to develop this?

This is amazing! Very nice to see there Russian radiostation from my hometown

Truly awesome experience. A mobile app like this would make it even better.

Great work, and nice complement of radiooooo.com

This is magical. Thank you for this experience.

Why so small number of stations from Africa?

Love this! Works great and simple design.

Not a single radio station in Greenland?

That's my mind-blow of the week

como colocar uma radio web no aplicativo? paulinholeme@yahoo.com.br www.estacaoleme.com.br

Support Radio Garden 100 per cent

Radio.Garden = App of the year!!

This is awesome! Great idea.

Awesome. Mobile app please!

Hello guys How do I add my web radio to Radio Garden Thank you al

radio. on. internet.

Wow! This site is pretty amazing. I like how it picked up my location and tuned into a local San Francisco radio station. The I scrolled the globe and rotated into my Dad's hometown of Bombay (they call it "Mumbai" now) and it zero-ed in on a Gazhal station. This one => http://radio.garden/live/mumbai/planetradiocity/

Question to the creator / OP: Are the ads (voice ads) that play injected into the stream? I ask because even though I selected an Indian radio channel, it played a long AT&T get a go phone this holiday season blah blah blah for like 2 minutes, and the voice was American accent and also the address it said to go to was att.com/gophone (which I would think is only US customers). What gives?

Maybe it's the radio station itself doing that? I remember reading about software for online streaming that targeted ads based on the client's IP.

> targeted ads based on the client's IP.

Didn't think of that. Wouldn't put it past them.

Perfect--now I can bone-up on Russian in time for the inauguration.

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