Radio Garden – Explore live radio by rotating the globe | Hacker News Reader

Radio Garden – Explore live radio by rotating the globe

radio.garden

461 pointsdayve123 comments

There is also an app called "radiodroid" (or maybe it is "radiodroid2"; on the https://f-droid.org app store that says it builds all the apps from free/open source) which I have very much enjoyed for this. Unlike the other 1-2 internet radio apps I tried, this one made it easy to browse thousands of stations, search by tag (I guess everything is in there), language, country, etc etc, set bookmarks, list listening history, and no annoying weirdness. Very few that I have tried had commercials, those that did were not enough to annoy: bach, beatles, ethnic, deep lounge, 1940's big band, tejano, on and on.

Edit: I also recall a nice little linux program called radiotray, on debian (that sat in the XFCE or maybe LXDE app tray / bar), that did something similar. Presumably there are others.

Edit2: I mention radiodroid and internet radio among ideas like watching news TV sites on the internet from around the world, on my simple fun/relaxation page: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854618463.html

Edit3: I tried libre.fm too (which basically seems to be an FSF initiative to flag or play favorite tracks from archive.org by category, and had high hopes, thought it had promising ideas, but though it seemed to work well at first, I later couldn't get anything to happen after I logged in, etc., and finally gave up. Mentioning in case others know better.

Radiodroid 2 is also available in the Play store.

Thank you for that. Finally time to say goodbye to TuneIn.

Heh, and I was about to mention TuneIn radio. I have been using it from 2013 to 2016. Then I switched to Spotify (premium) because I got tired of the ads in the radio stations.

FYI: RadioDroid 2 from F-Droid does not support Chromecast. RadioDroid 2 from Google Playstore supports Chromecast..

https://github.com/segler-alex/RadioDroid/issues/155

+1 for radio droid on android, has an alarm clock AND a sleep timer, which seems to be rare on hardware digital radios... (Even BBC sounds doesn't have an alarm clock).

If you also want to find different stations around the world there is also http://www.surfmusic.de/ which I often use for power 105.1FM in nyc, which is difficult to find a stream of here in the UK.

One correction to my earlier comment, where I said there were few commercials or not enough to annoy: sometimes there are, but with so many other stations one can usually just switch to something similar, it seems. I made a list of "favorites" and there were plenty to choose from, even tabernacle choir music, Russian spiritual music, etc.

RadioDroid is awesome, but the one feature I wish it has was Android Auto integration. The main place I listen to radio is in the car, and I end up falling back to TuneIn because I can change stations easily while driving.

If you like this to explore music of other places, try also https://radiooooo.com/ to travel through time and space.

Mentioned here a few times (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

I would like to contribute some songs. Do I have to upload them? What about copyright and stuff?

There is an option on the top right with icon of a black "record player" for uploading a song from an audio file. You might have to make an free account with an email.

This one: http://www.lightyear.fm/ is a neat visualization of the "radio bubble" around Earth about 110 light years in diameter (edit: radius).

>110 light years in diameter.

radius.

Haven't seen that before. Now I can recreate the opening to Contact at home!

I just got rick-rolled at 30LY.

I used this service a couple of years ago to listen to the local radio station from my home city.

It's indescribable how homesick it made me, but at the same time I felt so much more connected to my home after hearing the local news, and my regional accent which is somewhat rare.

for context; I'm British, from a city called Coventry (which does not have an accent similar its neighbours) and I live in Sweden, where everyone who speaks English sounds either American or very Swedish.

Same here, was surprised to see so many radios from my city (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and from the country side too, where they have an accent similar to my father's family. Still use radio.garden weekly, great service.

In case the developer is reading, feature requests:

(1) When browsing the list of radio stations, I can see the use of alphabetical by call letters. But the way my brain remembers radio stations is by band (AM/FM) and frequency. (Maybe it is ancient muscle memory from radios you tune with a knob.) So it would be nice to have this available as a view.

(2) In a large metro area, there are transmitters in different cities and suburbs. To get the full set of stations, I have to flip around between nearby points on a map and look at different lists. (For example, in the Bay Area, you have to click SF to get KQED then click Berkeley to get KPFA.) It would be super cool if I could click on any point on the map, then see one list of all stations that a radio at that location would pick up. Getting a completely accurate list is probably complicated (topography, weather, antenna type, etc.) but distance and maybe transmitter power would give a good approximation.

So how are all these radio stations connected to the Internet? Do all these radio stations have a server? Or is there some organization which does the broadcasting on behalf? Who pays for the streaming fees? Can I start my own station?

Actually -- all of these things.

Many radio stations have a server. Many of them sign up with an organization that does it for them. Sometimes the station just pays the fees out of general revenue, and sometimes the org inserts its own ads.

You can start your own station with icecast2, GPLd and available from icecast.org

Legal worries are your own.

Can't speak for every one of these, but yeah, it's usually just an audio feed encoded and streamed out to a server that handles the streams to listeners. There are several ways to do it but I only know the way I used to do it back in the early/mid 2000's.

Back then, I had an ever-updated playlist running on WinAmp with a ShoutCast plugin. Whatever I played (or when I switched over to mic, etc.) was streamed to a ShoutCast server I had running on some storage provided by a dude I knew who was working at a small ISP. He basically said they would never care or notice that I was streaming a 128k/sec stream to maybe 5 or 10 people at a time so just go for it, heh...

That said, I could've run it from home if I wanted, but this was more stable on an early 2000's broadband connection. Otherwise, today you could probably do this with any suitable online virtual web server.

As far as streaming fees, well...if you mean bandwidth, you can see above. If you mean license fees for copyrighted material, then that's the main reason I stopped running one. Loads of these did (and still do) fly under the radar, but you're still essentially sharing media with other people, so if it's not something you have the license to broadcast or share, you have to pay to license it.

For a time, I had been looking into an ASCAP/BMI license since (terrestrial) radio doesn't really pay much at all for that. Airplay is free advertising for commercial music sales, after all. But somewhere along the line in the wake of Napster freaking the hell out of music labels, the laws were put in place to be much more restrictive on streaming radio. Instead of a relatively affordable blanket license, you also had to pay per-song-per-listener royalties. The whole thing made it cost prohibitive for amateurs to legally run a music streaming station so I just said screw it and moved on.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from streaming something else. You can do a talk show or get license to stream local unsigned artists. You could do all sorts of things, just as people do with live video streaming. You just can't really do anything like typical FM or satellite music radio unless you wanna deal with quite a bit of licensing and expense outside of just a PC and bandwidth.

If you're willing to ignore legacy clients, you can use HTTP streaming with MPEG-DASH or HLS. These protocols chunk the stream into individual audio files of a few seconds each, which can be served from a normal HTTP server or even an S3 bucket with CloudFlare. The protocol allows better quality codecs than Shoutcast, handles dynamic bitrates, and even lets you rewind live streams. There are open source player libraries which work in all modern browsers, and some support them natively too.

I used to be user of TuneIn radio for a year or two but grew to dislike it with its newer heavier updates that you could not avoid and the pressure to go professional or whatever it's called. Now I just have bookmarks to the BBC Sounds webpage and also to the couple of other stations I listen to sometimes. It cuts out the middle man and the risk of initially great sites like this going the way of TuneIn radio and ruining the user experience.

If curious see also:

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18427701

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

Comments from the developer in both threads.

Similar database of internet radio stations: https://www.radio-browser.info

The radiodroid app mentioned elsewhere in comments uses this list as a source.

It's crazy how similar pop music sounds from all over the world. The language differs, but the energy of the music is similar in a lot of different countries.

I wonder if this is because everyone is using digital audio workstations like Ableton or Logic now. It used to be that different places had different instruments; and it would take years to become an expert. But now, the DAW is everybody's instrument.

musicians are the ultimate cross-pollinators .. someone, somewhere will inevitably get a creative buzz from listening to something solid from somwhere else.. its not a bad thing, entirely.. different strokes for different folks .. Think about "guitars", except over the centuries.. is it a technical copying that makes the music sound the same, since it is a stringed instrument, like those other ones ? hmm It certainly could be argued that pace of interaction can lead to loss of diversity.. isolated people dont copy music styles.. big topic !

A wonderful video exploring this: Everything is a Remix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc

Great site! But as I clicked on music radio stations across the US, they were almost all broadcasting commercials at the time. Which is one of the fundamental problems with the format.

Filter for public radio? In my opinion anything else isn’t worth listening anyways.

For non-commercial stations in the US, I can vouch for WBAI and WUSB in New York.

My vote, every time, has to be for WFMU. "The format", in 'FMUs case, is whatever the DJ likes to play.

You may end up listening to an hour of funk, followed by an hour of experimental noise, then old '78s and bluegrass. It makes for a fun listen.

https://wfmu.org/ - for a feel of programming, you can pick some of the DJs from here: http://www.wfmu.org/table

Yes! Freem-form WFMU is an incredible station. Though based in NJ, it has a worldwide listener base. It is entirely listener supported, without even corporate underwriting, unlike other public radio stations in the US. It also has internet accesible archives of programming that goes back into the 90's. If you have a unique musical itch, just Google that song and add WFMU as the site. Click and enjoy the playlist that pops up.

Another truly eclectic station is Radio Paradise. It's like a constant wandering journey with a great community.

Probably because they were all owned by iHeartMedia. Outside of a few AM stations, and a college station, they own everything in my area.

I would listen to broadcast radio if DJ's were hired for their muscial knowledge, and ability to put a playlist together. But I don't think they even use local people on these stations anymore. It's just the same tired old songs with a commercial break every 6 minutes.

Is there an open directory of radio stream URIs?

Like if I wanted to build my own tiny radio streaming client, where would I look for the streams?

I tried snooping the network tab in dev tools on Radio Garden, but couldn't see many requests that weren't either grabbing map tiles, or connecting to Radio Garden itself.

There is http://dir.xiph.org for Icecast radio stations.

Thank you!

http://www.radio-browser.info/

Thanks!

Strange, I tuned into a random South Africa station and the guy immediately started talking about radio garden. Coincidence? Did not sound like an advert because he immediately trailed off to talking about Netflix and some ex marine sniper stuff.

Perhaps he'd been browsing hacker news.

What a crazy world this is

This was the subject of a really nice NYTimes "Letter of Recommendation" recently https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/magazine/letter-of-recomm...

Recently, a user posted on my problem validation platform that she's unable to listen to radio from her home town (possibly rural India) from a foreign country[1].

Setting up SDR for this seems to be beyond the capacity of that user. Sites like these might address this need gap, if they allow the user to tune to specific frequency rather than being limited to particular stations[I understand that this has larger technical overhead].

P.S I checked the Radio Garden, it GeoIP's some stations, there were no prominent stations, mostly comprised of religious stations and couple of unknown hobby stations.

[1]https://needgap.com/problems/126-listening-to-obscure-intern...

Nice for discoverability. I've been positively surprised by [1] https://hirschmilch.de/ progressive stream, which i'm now listening to by other means.

(Should i feel Jägermeistered now?)

Great work! If op is maintainer, feature request: "random station in random city"

wow how does this work? is there a public list of radio stations? or does this site maintain a scraper of sorts?

Something I vaguely remember reading in an app (maybe it was the "internet radio" app or its description, from https://f-droid.org?) said there is a maintained list on the internet, of stations, like maybe in xml. (edit: or maybe where I read that was about the "radiotray" linux desktop app.)

edit: Ah, another comment has mentioned "Similar database of internet radio stations: https://www.radio-browser.info ".

That is really neat. I'd love to see an app like this which allows surfing the globe for listening to shortwave radio. Users could report which WebSDRs (for example) are picking up which stations. Then those stations are marked as live on the globe, and you can listen to the WebSDR audio feed(s) that are picking up that station, as if you're listening on a real shortwave radio.

Maybe individual WebSDR listings could show SINPO numbers, to allow users to choose a source based on the quality level that's currently available...hmmm!

You put radio... on the internet.

I think many people already listen to radio over the internet.

I believe there is a joke being missed here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/5n0xen/ca...

Just trying to make a reference to Silicon Valley (TV show).

Thanks for sharing this, heard my hometowns' radio station in Bolivia after 5 years of being away, nostalgia hit me hard. :)

For anyone who's curious - this is built with CesiumJS (https://cesium.com/), same as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21037167

Disclaimer: I work for Cesium.

You're probably aware but I will just report it anyway.

On that link (https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/), there doesn't seem to be a lower bound limit on the 'polar angle' rotation. So I am able to rotate below the 'horizon' and look up to the earth's 'inner surface' (the concave side of the mesh). The trajectories dashed lines are still rendered and drawn on top of the earth's 'bottom' but are all glitchy and intermitent.

This maybe an issue with this specific implementation and not cesium itself but just thought you should know.

If you’d like something a bit more curated, WFMU has a show called “The Blind Tourist” which is mostly audio collage from various global radio stations.

https://wfmu.org/playlists/TX All shows are archived and streamable for free.

This is great. For years I have been exploring radios around. Sometimes I add radios from my region to Radio Garden. Just send it through their form and wait to be accepted. I just wish it was easier to export their favorites. I once lost a good list of saved radios.

I came across this a while back and had hours of fun randomly sampling radio stations around the world. The one feature I wish it had was the ability to "lock" the current station while still being able to wander around looking for another station to try

There's a "Lock" button right above the zoom in/out buttons that does this.

Thanks! That's new, I haven't used Radio Garden in months and the previous version didn't have that.

All I want is an app that I can hotkey to my main (android) screen that starts a stream with an auto-sleep timer set to some value. I currently have to click like 6 times with various wait times to listen to my nightly "sleep time" stream.

Any app recommendations?

I mention radiodroid elsewhere here: it has a sleep timer that defaults to the last one set, so you would have to tap first to start the app, then 2nd to start a station (at the top of your favorites), then the timer and ok, so that is 4 taps I guess.

Edit: and it seems, an alarm clock.

Without a timer, if your stream can be found in a url form just save a link on your homescreen. One click can start it.

For a one button solution with timer if no app is satisfactory you can build your script in Workflow (IOS) or any other automation tool on android. You might find a script already made on your liking.

Try IFTTT or Automate.

Nice.

But, oh my god, why are mainstream radios stuck with the same 10 songs since what seems like forever ? First pickup: suzanne vega, second pickup: francoise hardy.

Wow, that was quite different from what I found.

First station I hit after moving a bit at random was A-ha's "Take On Me" followed by Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World". This was in Western Washington.

Zoomed way out and then back on somewhere in California. Got a station in Mariposa. First song was "Gentleman" by Fela Kuti, followed by "A Beautiful Story" by Sonny & Cher followed by "Big Lie, Small World" by Sting. So...1973 Nigerian afrobeat to 1967 pop to 1999 whatever the heck Sting is.

Could not figure out what that the connection was between the songs on the station, so decided to zoom out and in again, but head east a bit. See if I could find a station playing what you would stereotypically expect for its region.

Ended up at one in Jackson, WY, that was playing "Super Duper Rescue Heads!" by Deerhoof, which was followed by "Move" by CSS.

Finally, popped down to Texas, where I finally ran into the stereotypes I was looking for. Hit a sermon on a religious station, moved a bit and got some urban rap about Jesus, moved some more and got some Spanish song about Jesus, moved again and got some country/western song that was not about Jesus, and moved one final time and got a country/western song about Jesus. :-)

Me: lets listen to the middle of Africa. Second song - Manic Monday by the Bangles

Try Madagascar and nearby islands. 90% of what I got there was sufficiently off the beaten path that neither Shazam nor SoundHound could tell me what it was.

Awesome. Feature request: show tooltip showing station name/location on hover so that I don't need to change location to get station info.

I'm impressed... a bit crazy while you are zoomed out, but when you zoom in it's actually a good way to navigate through a country.

Overall I like it, great interface. I would like to be able to explore the map without changing the station I'm actively listening to.

You can do this. Click the lock icon and then you can browse around without changing stations.

This is wonderful! I forgot how beautiful Cambodian pop was. Be really nice if they had country borders and city labels as an option too.

Thank you so much for this. It makes me so happy that I can be in different country and yet listen to my favorite station back home.

Just wondering what would happen if you combined these thousands of radio stations to 1 stream. Would it result to white noise?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_Landscape_No._4_(Mar...

I have used it for a while now, thanks for the work put in it! I would love to have some sleep timer added to it.

Any good recommendations on which cities ahve great radio ? I mostly stick to London and surroudning area.

This feels like the opening to a movie that needs an intro to the variability of human societies. Love it!

Why do so many US stations have such cryptic abbreviated names? And why do so many start with W or K?

It was a naming convention created in the early 1900s, using the Mississippi River as a rough line of delineation. Local TV stations use a similar convention.

https://www.rd.com/culture/radio-stations-k-w/

Oh wow so they don't even stand for anything? Must be hard to brand an abbreviation you get handed!

The three latter letters are usually meaningful, but only barely. For example, there’s WGBH, a Boston public broadcasting station that stands for Great Blue Hills, which are the hills that the broadcasting antenna is located on.

Also related to the etymology of Massachusetts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts#Etymology

You can request a call sign along with getting your license from the FCC. The process has changed over time, but many (most?) call signs have some sort of historical connection to something: e.g. KRON was broadcast from the SF Chronicle newspaper building, WRCT is Carnegie Mellon's University's station (originally Radio Carnegie Tech, from before it was CMU). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...

It seems to go in both directions: you can ask for one that has some meaning to you (which you can then potentially get if no one is using it), or you can try to make up a backronym. I don't remember good backronym examples but I know they exist. The stations will also vary in whether they prefer for people to pronounce the whole callsign, or just part of it, or spell it out. (Technically I think the callsign is always spelled out when used as a callsign, but not necessarily when used as a brand.)

I believe K is for west of the Mississippi River and W is for the east.

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

In Canada they all start with C.

Radio stations don't have call signs in my country, they just give themselves descriptive names of what they play like 'Classic FM'.

Congrats! You successfully found me a replacement for TuneIn :)

Navigating on a map is so much more practical

One of the few applications pinned to my browser in the past year.

It's a fantastic work companion.

Same here. Although I wish it would show the song names.

The radiodroid app does (which I mentioned in another comment here), at least, and probably others -- it seems to depend on the station.

There’s always Shazam

When would you guys listen to radio ? And why not Spotify, podcast, YouTube etc ?

Haha I use YouTube as my music player or soundcloud/bandcamp

Podcasts are hard to listen to while writing code imo/same with new music I usually loop stuff I already know.

I listen to international radio, mostly for countries where I have previously lived (a handful). I also listen to some online radio stations, particularly Radio Paradise and soma.fm .. I've donated to both in the past.

I have Spotify, and I have about 1500 artists that I follow, but even their algos keep feeding me the same stuff all the time. And there's no "flow" between songs in "Built for you" playlists (Youtube Music, as well).

And sometimes, for certain kinds of moods, I want to listen to music where I don't understand the lyrics. International radio is great for that, even when the DJs/announcers break in and talk.

That said, I never ever listen to real radio anymore, and I'd only really do that in my car. I move around the US West a lot, and updating my radio presets for the 3-4 locations I'm in frequently is harder to manage than online radio platform presets.

I think that there is something to be said about professionally curated music. Most terrestrial radio is irrelevant (in the US at least, thanks to ClearChannel) but I've been listening to SomaFM for awhile now and genre for genre I like it better than what any algorithm has put together.

One word: Discovery.

College radio is excellent for this. My favorite DJ has been on 4 hours a week for a decade, and most of the music is new to me. Half is OK in the background, there can be a handful of awful grindy noise bleh, but another bunch of it is often great, and there are amazing gems that have taken my listening off into new frontiers — from Bevis Frond to Gravitar to Mono to Expo 70.

The most common question the kids ask is: How can you listen to that? The answer is: I’m happy to listen to unfamiliar and even unpleasant music if that’s the price to discover something completely unexpected and amazing.

I'd happily listen to a Spotify playlist if i could reliably discover playlists in specific genres that have a good mix of stuff and are regularly updated. Spotify doesn't seem to have an interface for that.

Not that radio is always well-curated either!

I especially like radio for video games. Certain games really lend themselves to it. Like Euro Truck Simulator. Driving a lorry around Sweden, making deliveries while listening to local radio, makes for quite an immersive experience.

I want to travel in time in listen to radio/TV in a specific point in time.

It's interesting how few streaming stations there are in eastern Asia.

http://www.radio-browser.info/gui/#!/countries lists 1625 stations in China, of which barely a handful appear on radio.garden. I guess nobody volunteered to put them all on the map.

I could be wrong, but I figured South Korea might not do regular radio that much. It has dense population and a big network of mobile data for streaming.

Very cool. Never seen anything like this, though they may exist. Well done

Thank you very much for this great interface to online terrestrial radio!

I have nothing to add to the discussion but this so cool :D

Spot on. A HN show that might actually use every day!

Someone needs to make this for DTV...

dang! i forgot about this. thank you. it's like scanning the radio on grand theft auto

This is so cool. Love it.

Very nice onterface, tnx!

part of me wishes this site was called "sound.garden"

When I first saw the band's name in the early 90s, my imagination ran wild with what they might be like. Considering the musical landscape at the time (a few I was aware of-- Enya, Fishbone, Skinny Puppy, Ice Cube, Slayer) it could have been anything and everything.

They are still one of my favorite bands, and Badmotorfinger is probably in my top 3 albums of all time... but I must admit I was disappointed when I first heard them because my expectations had been so crazy from the name. It took going through some tough times before I warmed up to their style, and the name never seemed to have much to do with it. It's a great name, though.

It's named after a permanent outdoor sculpture installation in Seattle.

This has been around for years, what makes it front-page-of-HN-worthy now?

save that for the more frequently reposts :)

It offers some variety when so many of us are working from home?

Also, just because it isn't new doesn't mean it isn't interesting.

Thank you. Just found this beauty on Faroe Islands http://radio.garden/listen/-7fm/EgrMqzvq

I suppose this is strictly for terrestrial radio stations? I run an internet radio station[1] and there is a galaxy of us.

[1] https://hymns.fm

This is lovely, thanks!

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