Hacker News Reader

I actually find Sirius frustrating for long road trips or commutes; most of the channels repeat their content every 6 or 7 or 8 hours. I often find the same programming on my home journey that was on when I was on the way in. Many news type channels like BBC endlessly repeat every hour.

Having a pile of podcasts and audiobooks ready at hand makes long drives on ski trips much more tolerable to me... But I do keep the Sirius subscription around just for NPR and BBC...

I find a streaming radio app to give the best variety of content. You can find any particular public radio show playing live somewhere in the US. And plenty of indie radio options as well.

This happened long before "streaming audio" or 'apps' were a real thing. Also I live in Canada and drove in USA & Canada. The roaming charges were astronomical and didn't include data. The situation isn't much better now, but atleast I have USA data coverage upto 1GB.

Cellphone plan options in Canada are punitive and oppressive. Getting coverage in USA & Canada is painful.

When I was driving in the States, data-usage was measured in kB.

When I'm on long enough trips to start hitting repetition, I change channels periodically. There are a handful I like, so rotating isn't a bad thing. But yes, I do wish each channel had more songs in rotation at any given time.

I also found Sirius frustrating in the same manner. Except for me, it was my daily commute. I could set the clock by the playlist. I only listened to 2 channels and for some reason, the traffic updates to my car stopped working. When they wanted something like $400 to renew for 1 year, I said fuck off.

Yeah, reception to your in-car receiver was ridiculous. We switched over to internet-only for $8 a month and stream to our phones. I swear the bitrate is higher, too.

A tip for anyone reading here — SiriusXM will gladly give you a year of service for $60+fees (about $74 last time for me). You don’t even need to threaten to cancel. Every year I call, tell them it is too expensive, but I’d stay if they give me the same price, and they always do. Something like the last 10 years...

Way back before Sirius and XM merged, XM used to have a bunch of stations that were DJed by humans. I don't remember ever hearing repeated blocks of content on those. There were other channels that were DJed automatically, and those could get repetitive, but the channels with human DJs were always fresh.

Sadly, it appears they started firing the human DJs several years back -- see https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/02/10/will-firin... for an example.

The quality is also worse than FM in many cases. Satellite radio sucks for music.

I'm definitely in the minority here, but I cancelled my Spotify subscription in favor of SiriusXM.

There were a couple changes they've made recently that made this make sense. One, all their car subscriptions now come with an app version. And two, they have a pretty cool Web UI (https://player.siriusxm.com) where you can listen to any channel live or experiment with "Xtra" channels (it's a Pandora integration.)

My use case is that I work mostly from home and want something mindless to play in the background while I'm working. Spotify playlists quickly become repetitive. Sirius is "set it and forget it"--I have all the channels and Xtra channels I want in a grid on their website, and I have it up on a second monitor so I can just click on whatever channel I want.

I still miss Spotify on occasion, but if I want a specific song or artist I can just go to YouTube and stream it.

Having said all this, yesterday and today I've just been streaming long house mixes on YouTube. I wanted something a bit more upbeat than the Chill channel and I've heard all the songs on BPM. But I'm sure I'll be back to Sirius soon. :)

If you really want to lock in your long mix/specific moods, check out di.fm. Its all hand curated and the genre's all have a particular mood about them, many of which are just the right amount of vocal/nonvocal to push you through a day.

Also just a warning - SiriusXM doesn't just let you leave. They have some of the most aggressive "winback" salespeople in the business, and they will NEVER stop mailing you offers that look like something else, calling you, and emailing you offers once you manage to leave. Their skeevy tactics have put me off the company as a whole forever.

Oh, that's wild...I had no idea they still existed. I was a paid subscriber of theirs for many years back in the day. I'll check it out again; thanks!

Also di.fm will play artist's shows (aka podcasts) at certain times on certain channels. It should be under the calendar tab.

I have never subscribed to a streaming music service as I would rather purchase a song I like once and own it forever. So di.fm and several dance music artist shows keep new music coming in.

I have SiriusXM in the car and had it when it was just XM. I only listen to small number of channels and when I don't want to hear what's on any of them, I have an iPod Touch that I can use over Bluetooth to listen to purchased music, downloaded podcasts, and audiobooks.

I really wish Sirius would simulcast di.fm's channels just for the variety that they can't (and don't try to) compete with.

Yeah, I bought a used car and have never even been a customer of theirs but I guess they bought my info from someone and I have been getting their mailings nonstop.

The worst are the ones in blank envelopes with no return address that look like they could be from a bank or something.

Nope, not the only one, I much prefer radio programmed by a human to one programmed from an algorithm. I have an actual sat radio in the car, and I use the streaming with amazon speakers at home.

> My use case is that I work mostly from home and want something mindless to play in the background while I'm working.

XM used to have a clever little device specifically designed for this use case -- the XM-PCR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM_PCR). It was a little XM receiver that plugged into your PC and could be driven from there via client software. And the protocol for communicating with the device was pretty open, so hackers quickly put together really good native clients for Windows, OS X, Linux, etc. that were miles better than both XM's default client and their Web player.

It only lasted for a couple years, though, because those same hackers eventually figured out a way for clients to just rip every song that passed through the XM-PCR into high-bitrate MP3 files on your hard drive. So what went from a neat, hackable little device quickly turned into a music pirate's dream.

There was a gentleman's agreement for a while between the developers of the major clients not to take advantage of this capability, as they all knew that if it ever got exploited at scale XM would shut down the PCR and all their work would instantly be rendered worthless. But inevitably someone shipped a client with this "feature", and XM predictably stopped selling the PCR and remotely disabled all existing units. Boom, so ends a scene.

(Here's a contemporary story from Ars Technica with more detail on the shutdown: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2004/08/4147-2/)

It was all too bad, as like I said, if your use case was playing music while you worked the PCR was a really cool little device. I suppose this is why we can't have nice things :-/

FWIW, the XMPCR still works if you can find one. I still have one active from when I got lifetime XM service in 2008, even did the digital out mod.

I renewed Sirius recently since they sent me an acceptable deal with free Echo dot.. which I sold.

I will admit that I really like some of the programs. Business channel in particular is decent. Between interviews of Larry Summers and Madeline Albright it feels like a nice departure from BREAKING NEWS COVERAGE.

And I am saying it as a person who has audio books ready to go if traffic gets too heavy.

Sirius used to have some of the best comedy talk radio but all the good talent got fired or watered down. Sirius like most mega corp media companies became very PC conscious, especially after the merger with XM, which is a precarious place for (quality) comedy to exist. Especially as they matured. But early on it was great for that stuff and helped build many of today’s famous comedians careers as guests on the shows.

Now even Howard Stern hardly shows up and is doing puff piece shows with Hillary Clinton in between his reality TV nonsense.

I remember listening to one show and half the callers were truckers where it became a running joke.

I got really lucky. Bought my car 4 years ago. They said it included a 3 month sirius subscription. It still works to this day. My wife bought a car a couple years ago with a 3 month subscription and it ended on day 90 :(

You might enjoying tuning in to Radio Garden: https://radio.garden/

This is extremely cool. Thanks so much for sharing.

this might change my life. thanks!

Also try radiolise.github.io

This is the coolest thing i’ve seen this year! Thanks for sharing.

Wow Thanks!!!

Stuff like soma.fm replaced that for me. There’s nothing like turning on groove salad for a bit.

There was a period of time where, after work, some friends and I would get together in one of our university's research labs to solder keyboards. It was always empty by then. We'd put on soma.fm and then get to work. Good times.

same here. I am gladly donating every year. Today I find hand picked music more valuable than ever.

Stories like this is why I love reading HN comments. Thanks for sharing your experience!

100% agreed. The tech discussion is always interesting, but especially so when informed by our diverse experience.

I honestly hadn't considered this use case for satellite radio. I used to do 5-6 hour drives through areas with crappy cell service and awful radio (only country, gospel or a sermon). Spotify _helped_ with its download feature so I could play tracks I liked locally, but sadly satellite wasn't an option for me since I was driving an '04 Jeep.

> satellite wasn't an option for me since I was driving an '04 Jeep

How so? If it had an FM tuner, you can use an inline modulator.

There are and always were satellite radio options that don't have to be built in to the car. My first satellite radio (Sirius, before they merged) was actually battery powered and portable - I could clip the antenna to my backpack and listen while I walked the dog. (This was before mobile streaming was really a thing.) Like others here are bringing up though, I've found the variety on the music channels to be lacking. These days I get more mileage out of Pandora and a few podcasts.

Also a fun little note - if you have a standalone radio with active service, then turn it off and stuff it in a box, cancel the service, and wait a few months or a year before pulling it back out, you'll have free service for the life of the radio. They stop sending the device specific kill codes after a while so it will just keep working.

>MY favorite times would be at night and manually adjusting the AM reception and picking up stations from all over the world. Trying to discern their location based on the commercials.

I recently got into this as a hobby! Bought a cheap portable shortwave radio and every night this week I've sat outside or near the window to see how far away I could pick stuff up from. So far I've confirmed broadcasts from Romania, South Korea, Cuba, and a few across the US. It's usually just preachers or state propaganda, but just the hunt for new stations is half the fun!

This actually got me into amateur radio as a hobby.

It started when I was young and not tired enough to goto sleep. I had a decades-old transistor radio and would scroll through the dial using the smallest fractions of adjustment and hearing the world open to me.

Dark of night, speaker pressed to my ear so my parents wouldn't hear and yell at me. Languages I'd never heard before and had no way of knowing where they were.

Magical is the best way I can describe the experience.

The world became both small, and vast in the same moment.

I received a trial of Sirius when I bought my vehicle. My Dad bought a life-time subscription (at a time they were practically giving them away) so I had listened to Sirius a few times when borrowing his car. My impression was they have bought and paid for a particular catalogue of music and they play that catalogue pretty exclusively. That catalogue seemed to have the 4th or 5th most popular songs from a huge list of artists but rarely the top 3. It is a massive catalogue but when you listen to it enough it starts to become repetitive and I would start to wonder "do they even have any other songs by that artists" after hearing a b-side for the third or fourth time.

I even considered buying it anyway since I like to go on trips to remote areas (fishing/camping) and can't rely on data for my phone for Spotify. In many rural places there is only a single radio station and even then it may be mostly static. But I found in those locations even Satellite reception was spotty, especially in the mountains or valleys I frequented.

Compared to top-40 FM radio, Sirius is amazing. It had its time. But comparing it to the internet with Youtube and Spotify (or Apple Music, etc.) just blows it away.

The worst part about Sirius is that the music channels seemingly can’t go more than 2 songs without inane DJ banter that can go on for entirely too long. Thankfully they have sports and talk-oriented channels, but the music part of Sirius is practically unlistenable due to the constant interruptions.

Why not listen to audiobooks? That's what I did when I had to drive to work. I eventually get bored of music. Audiobooks though are never boring, and there's a near endless supply of them. Where I live you can borrow them from a library as well. You can't listen to audiobooks when e.g. reading code or even coding, but you totally can while driving.

While I don't normally condone the use of swearing, I applaud your use of it here.

I moved furniture for a few years in my early 20s, and none of the trucks had working air conditioning. That was during a heat wave with 110 F heat, which translates to 120+ at the top of a trailer. The air conditioning should have worked at the very least to prevent a heat-exhaustion death.

Some things in life will never change, and those things well and truly are $#!@.

One may only swear around you when engaged in traditionally blue-collar careers? I'm pretty sure every engineering department I've ever been in would have a choice word or two.

Fuck work trucks without a/c in hot climates

The reason why I cancelled SiriusXM was because of lack of diversity. A huge chunk of the channels were the sports channels which I did not care about.

Music channels were outright weird and all of them played may be 20 songs again and again.

They had zero diversity of music. There are plenty of non-white, non-american born people in North America and yet they did not have any Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Punjabi channels.

In the modern era would streaming over cellular been good enough if you were still a truck driver?