Google Earth for live radios | Hacker News Reader

Google Earth for live radios

radio.garden

522 pointsjaoued98 comments

Thanks for the post OP. Nice to be back on the HN homepage again.

We launched Radio Garden almost two years ago. Since four months I have shifted from doing RG on the side to giving it my full attention. We are doing millions of monthly visitors from all over the world. Now our mission is to build out the platform in such a way that people can use it as their main destination for radio.

We are currently focusing on putting out some much needed features like search. Next up will be some great curation features to help guide you to stations you care about and also surprise you with hard to find gems.

Happy to answer any questions!

I would like to ask if there are any updates for radio addresses. Right now Barrow, AK cannot be connected. It was interesting for me to listen the news they have at corner of earth. Thanks and keep up the good work.

It works for us: http://radio.garden/live/barrow-ak/kbrw/

This is super cool, and it reminds of the utopian public imagination of the future of the internet in the 90's. When cyberspace was often showcased in the form of actual spaces instead of the flat list like presentations we have ended up with today. The weird 3d intermezzo between console based computing and a future that ended being all about windows, lists and buttons.

It's like when interfaces become map-based, especially on top of an actual 3d globe, something weird happens and some of the skizoid foggy fragmentation of the modern internet falls away and becomes ordered.

There is a scarcely known concept called Psychogeography that has to do with the interaction between humans, places and emotions, and its like globe based presentations of data does something both important and magical that works as an antidote to the disassociation, rootlessness and loss of both history and empathy that cyberspace without geographical anchors has lead us to.

90's comic book pop-esoterica took up the idea of the living-city, an advanced evolution of the Anima or the spirit from tribal religions, where each street, neighbourhood and country had it's own unique mood created from the people-cells of the country-organism. This spirit was an amalgamation of the locally anchored tastes, music, smells, sights and philosophies - unique to each area and that formed a somewhat cohesive aesthetic framework that functioned as a local mythology in which people could form an individual identity or an identity as a neighbourhood or a country.

The internet has somewhat eradicated these local emergent properties because people look into their phones and don't connect with each other locally anymore. Today cyberspace is all encompassing and we don't go to a gadget to get emerged, we exist inside of it at all times and everywhere.

This in turn has lead us to become fuzzy identities that has difficulties navigating without a GPS or other authoritarian maps of meaning while the parts of the brain devoted to navigation shrinks with unknown consequences.

These unknown consequences presents themselves most potently when "something clicks" sporadically and we become aware of the spaceless, fractured fog we have come to exist inside of at all times. Looking at a globe with some cultural context is one of the mystical potent Sigils or gateways that instantly helps to deprogram and declutter this noisy feeling and becomes a starting point for further non-insane exploration.

+1 for psychogeography. This is a cool comment, do you have any recommendations for books/essays in this vein beyond Guy Dubord?

Edit: an => any typo

wow this is resonating with me. Got anything more to tell about this topic?

Comments like this are why I keep coming back to HN. That living-city concept blows my mind on so many levels. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and diverse perspective!

I was super into grabbing the stream database they are using. (For my own personal wifi radio)

This page has an interesting behavior when used without a session key: http://data.radio.garden/live.json It returns stations but with fake/warning data.

   id	"radio-afghanistan"
   name	"This app is fake"
   website	"http://rta.org.af/"
   src	"http://radio.garden/public/fake-app-warning.mp3"

I guess they don't intend on opening any of this up

Use http://www.radio-browser.info/gui/#/ instead

That is fantastic. I was looking exactly for a list like that one to build a online radio player on a small headless board. Thankyou!

This is an awesome resource, exactly what I needed.

Thanks for posting it

Good DB, thanks! It sez:'Community-driven effort', 'Any help is appreciated!'

Found and updated a couple of my old 'missing in action' links, and added a couple of good ones they were missing.

My guess would be this was added after another app started hitting their endpoints? Otherwise there would be no point to doing it like this.

Previously discussed in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164058

I noticed there that the top comment is "developer here, ..." by user studiopuckey, do you work with them?

What's "Show HN" etiquette here? Is submitting something two years old cool, or is it only supposed to be for new things or posted once?

Yeah, I'd say it's cool as long as you're not spamming it. 2 years is a long time and likely out of the memory of most. But, this is just my personal opinion. For example, I've never seen this site and it's pretty cool. Happy it was posted.

Reposting the same Show HN with a different user ID is strange though. It's supposed to be personal work

This post might be some sneaky marketing for whatever it is OP is promoting in its profile.

This is the second random Show HN post in three days under this profile.

It is supposed to be for your own work that you want feedback on. Using the "Show HN" tag for a "normal" submission is a potential hack or cheat to try to get a bit more visibility and increase the odds of getting traction. When used that way, it's deemed a misuse of the tag.

As others pointed out, the issue is that it needs to be the submitter's own work. We've taken "Show HN" out of the title above.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

(We have no relation to OP and were also surprised to see this posted under Show HN)

Well that can't be good. I'm sorry to see your work claimed by someone else. @Dang, is there anything that can be done about this?

Very sorry as my intention was not to claim the work. I completely ignored the posting rule because I did not know. A friend of mine sent me the link and I found Radio Garden so amazing that I wanted to share it to this community. I really meant no other intentions except sharing it widely for the greater good. Again apologies to the author studiopuckey and everyone else who felt offended.

Really impressed with this. It's something I would never have known I wanted until I saw it. I'm happily scrolling around different countries to get a taste of what they are playing.

I only speak English fluently but I've been learning some French and I can see this helping.

Same. I must say all pop music seems to sound the same no matter the language.

This is great, thanks for sharing! There's something slightly related but more focused on music from a specific time period in a country. It's called Radiooooo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428147), just submitted it too because I thought others might find it interesting too.

Thanks for that. This is awesome too. Easy to use.

Super, super cool, and super super clever. Congrats and amazing job!

Small UX feedback: I wish I could pan to another part of the globe and then click on a radio station, rather than it almost immediately switching to whatever station is closest to the middle of my view. (I'd like to keep listening to the old one a bit before choosing the new one.) Also, the + and - buttons seem wonky and sometimes seem to get stuck/inactive.

This is amazing!

If you’re up for some traditional southern Tunisian music, tune in here: http://radio.garden/live/djerba-midun/ulysse-fm/

Best Radio Ever ! Makes me feel that I can immediately connect to the vibe of any nation/community through the music or shows that they like. Not too many features like many here thought you should have had, I think you have hit the right balance where I can choose a radio and continue listening to it without having extra controls over volume or giving the ability to browse while still listening which could unknowingly distract a user from listening the current stream. Thank you for making this.

I keep this on my bookmarks bar and dip in often. It reminds me of when, as a child in the UK, I made a crystal radio from a kit and spent late evenings hunting for intesting stations from continental Europe.

An especially cool feature is that it changes the URL when you select a station (which Google Earth does) into a nice human-readable one with a slug (which Google Maps does not) example (my old college radio station) http://radio.garden/live/westfield-ma/wskb-89-5-fm/

Quick question, (I can’t check the site where I’m at currently), can anyone recommend a service that plays historical radio recordings? For example the radio (with the historical dj/commercials also) from the 1970-90s or older? Preferably not just short snippets, and I’d be open to purchasing recordings if a streaming service isn’t available.

The only thing I know of like that is, alas, extinct. ReelRadio's Top-40 Aircheck stuff. http://reelradio.com/

(I had no luck on Wayback; YMMV) Somewhere out there, someone's sitting on that stuff. I'd be eager to learn more.

(Also out there somewhere is a 48-hour 'History of Rock' radio series that originated 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rock_and_Roll and was updated a couple of times. It WAS online ... I wanna say, a decade ago?)

https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio

https://archive.org/details/radioprograms

Enjoy!

This is awesome, listening to some sweet latin-influenced jazz playing in Mogocha, Russia and remembering how I thought the internet would bring us together some day when I was a kid.

Oh my goodness there are so many! I like to think I grok the scale of the world, and it's easy to trick yourself into thinking it is all pretty uniform. But it really is unfathomable at the human scale of granularity. Awesome project!

I love this! It took me about 10 secs to find something I enjoy listening to.

The UI and ease of access to so many streams is incredible. Great job.

As someone who enjoyed listening to AM/MW/LW bands before the internet, this brings back a lot of memories. Back in those days the only way to “connect” to the world was by trying to tune to radio stations as far as away as possible. Not being able to understand the language wasn’t a problem, as long as you could hear something different and understand how different (but similar) we all are.

I really like this. I could see this being a great add-in for Volumio[1].

[1] https://volumio.org

The elephant that isn't in the room: China (one Hong Kong station and that's it). Anyone know if their government restricts streaming?

Sadly, we were recently blocked by the Chinese government on the DNS level. Although we do have many Chinese users on VPN. We don't have so many Chinese stations, because they mostly broadcast using the Windows Media Audio format.

To echo everyone else, this is amazing.

Currently listening to Black Velvet at http://radio.garden/live/saarbrucken/classicrock-radio/

This is going to help my fledgling German no-end.

This is amazing! I discovered Seoul Community Radio -- which is of the ilk as Berlin Community Radio.

These little stations are total gems. What a fun site!

[1] http://radio.garden/live/seoul/seoul-communtiy-radio/

[1a] http://seoulcommunityradio.out.airtime.pro:8000/seoulcommuni... (direct)

[2] http://radio.garden/live/berlin/berlin-community-radio/

This is one of my favorite internet radio ~stations~ websites. My only beef is that I wish there was a more permanent way to bookmark stations. The current implementation uses cookies or something that doesn't allow me to sync between browsers.

This is definitely on our todo list. Because we have so many users, we want to make sure we do this in a scalable way. We are currently moving from a very static file based lamp stack to a regionally distributed docker swarm based microservices setup.

How long before television.garden?

This is incredible, I'm curious about what you're using for rendering the earth though, is it google maps? If so, how are you able to afford the costs of the api? I love it already, but I'm already worried about its sustainability.

Its a project for some dutch gallery from designer and programer Jonathan Puckey. Big name in design/art scene. I am not connected to the studio but some friends worked there and from my foggy memory the project had excactly those problems. It got big some time ago and although it was supposed to be more local thing they started to get rejected by google analytics and maps. I think instead folding the project the gallery is just swallowing the costs. It goes from Dutch grants - so state money.

According to NoScript, it's loading the map from http://www.arcgis.com.

EDIT: In the credits, they link to https://cesiumjs.org/

this is amazing! congratulations on the great work! how does it get the radio feeds from all over the globe?

Presumably because a lot of radio stations nowadays also stream on the web, this is just an aggregator with a great way to browse the information.

It's incredibly mind-opening, if I asked you "Do you think Timbuktu has a radio station?", you'd say "For sure.", and we could even google that term to find a website or two, but with them visualized on a globe we could just randomly browse places to listen to what the locals are listening (sadly Timbuktu doesn't seem to be on their map).

Looks cool, but I'm not sure what the +/- buttons do, they seem to only move the globe sometimes and zoom in and out other times.

Currently zoomed too far in and can't zoom out.

Zoom buttons just pick random stations in Firefox. In Edge the map doesn't even move. Mobile Safari doesn't work at all.

Devs gotta stop testing their apps only in Chrome. Not everyone wants Google spyware shit on their systems.

thank you for posting this. Interesting how euRope has so many stations. Greece for example has more stations than India on this list http://www.radio-browser.info/gui/#/countries Is there a concerted european effort to list stations perhaps because the money for this is dutch? Or does the internet access of a country affect this?

India is actually in the top three countries visiting Radio Garden. We believe internet access and costs do indeed affect how many stations can afford to be online. Another reason is that in certain regions, stations tend to use streaming formats like Windows Media Audio, which is not supported on the web. We have a submission system and actively add all submitted stations. A few hundred a week are added to the database.

Amazing project.

I just submitted a local radio station. Since this is in the front page, I guess that you'll be overwhelmed with the number of new submissions, though. :)

I decided to broaden my horizons a bit, see what I could find in Mexico.

The first station was playing "Feel It Still" by Portugal. The Man.

Anyway, awesome application.

Love it! When traveling I often enjoy listening to local radio (assuming I understand at least some of the language) in e.g. taxi/Uber. I find that often it gives you perspective and level of detail impossible to get researching the place on the internet. With the fantastic UI of this app I already feel more connected to a lot of places I’m interested in.

Very nice. I'm surprised you don't bother to equalize the audio levels between stations, though, any reason for that?

This is going places. It's quite useful.

Best feature of it is that it is fast to load.

Also, being able to listen to WW2 Nazi Propaganda (and a fun commentary about it):

http://radio.garden/history/warsaw/ghost-voices/

Very Cool. Love the auto geo location feature to zero in a local station. This makes the first impression really awesome! You using some type of ip to location lookup, then doing a db lookup for a local station, then connecting me?

Not the author, but it seems so; in the credits they link to https://github.com/puckey/freegeoip/

I'm slightly freaked out that it went to within 100 meters of my house while I'm all the way across the country, but it seems like it goes there for my colleagues as well, so I guess that's just a coincidence :)

Seconding the request to be able to "lock" a station while scrolling. Other than that it is perfect - UX and discovery is intuitive, the station listings are comprehensive, and the music sounds great

This is rad. It's an early monday morning and I'm listening to what would be late night wave anime radio in Japan. Really cool idea and solid execution.

Lovely, I'm particularly impressed with how fast the streams started. Biggest surprise for me was Kiribati and Saint Helena.

Very cool but really, really needs a volume control so that I can set the radio volume separately to the other tabs I have open.

It would be nice for it to follow your location on mobile, tuning to the nearest station as you drive across different towns.

I honestly don’t know if this is tongue in cheek or not (if it is: bravo!), but does your car radio not serve that purpose?

Perhaps an option to return to the previously selected station would be useful? Basically just an undo button...

Can someone integrate this with Alexa? :)

Groundhog day. ..It has something interesting the combination of geography and music. Always great

I love this creation! Thank You, shouldn't you add a login service so favorites are not lost?

the same thing but in json... if you want to implement on your projects, as I probably will... http://cdn2.radio.garden/live.json

This is really cool. My friends and I are greatly enjoying it. Thanks!!

No radios in China. Looks like those satellite night of NK photos

One of the coolest things I've seen on HN in a long time.

This site makes me happy. A request: dark theme, please.

Great idea, but having no volume control is awful.

It has the same volume control as pretty much anything else: your operating system’s.

Also, hard to take someone seriously when they use the word "awful" to describe the lack of some minor UI enhancement.

Well, hard to take someone seriously when they don't understand that it's not a minor UI enhancement.

Call it a major UI enhancement. Is it still appropriate use of "awful"?

In my opinion yes. There's trend on dumbing down media UI on desktop, even though it doesn't have restrictions of mobile, with instagram being prime example - no volume control and no ability to move position. It's their choice for UI not technical problem. I have several sound sources - couple of sites in tabs that don't have volume control, media player, notification sounds, etc. They are all set in balance to my liking and I don't want to fiddle with global volume for every site.

And that's very inconvenient.

I don't get that (maybe Apple devices make volume management easier than other manufacturers?), but perhaps more importantly, isn't the site just feeding your browser a link to a 3rd-party stream?

In other words, I doubt the site _could_ do anything about the volume.

This is much fun! Kudos for building this!

Time to find that radio signal from Vega.

Wow. This is awesome, great submission!

Love the idea! Congratulations.

I love it. It's magical.

my kid fantasies of having a short wave radio become true

thanks for sharing radiooooo.com ! this is AMAZING !

this is super cool

SUPER COOL

I find the green dots easy to miss on a green earth.

I find the gray dots even easier to miss.

I wish I could "lock" a stream while I spin the globe, just to be able to browse and see how dense an area is for signals, before committing or stopping what I was listening to.

History didn't do what I expected it to do AT ALL. I wanted to find a stream I had previously, but lost because I couldn't find the dot due to the previously aforementioned issues.

Okay now that I'm in History anyway, why am I stuck in 1987? Can I change the year... with the plus and minus buttons? Nope! Okay I'm done with History now.

Good job! Looking forward to seeing this evolve

Gimmicky ... but it was really fun to scroll around various countries. Nice job.

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