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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Try listening to a music radio station sometime. I turned one on for the first time a 10 years a couple weeks ago and in a 45 minute drive heard approximately 2 songs. The entire rest was station identifiers and commercials.

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The non-commercial band in the United States is 88-92FM. All the best (many college) stations will be in this band: KFJC, WFMU, KEXP... Radio is alive and well in the U.S., its just not commercial radio.

KEXP is amazing. Highly recommend people check them out (online at kexp.org if you're not in seattle).

They have some good stuff on YouTube as well.

Agreed and thanks for the reminder. I used to listen to KEXP online even when I lived in Seattle. Phones are more common than radios these days.

Huh. KUOW, (one of) Seattle’s NPR stations, is on 94.9. Wonder what the story there is

The band was donated to them by KING

88.1-91.9 MHz is reserved for noncommercial educational (NCE) stations, so only they can use those frequencies. However, there's nothing that disallows NCE stations from operating on unrestricted frequencies (so long as they are licensed, of course). It's not very common, though, because radio spectrum is expensive.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-commercial_educational_sta...

Most of the time, I prefer silence to the radio. It is really bad…

That's why I pay ~$5/mo for satellite radio. I don't even drive that much but it's worth it to not listen to ads the whole time.

Even on SiriusXM, the DJs never seem to shut up.

One of my fondest "one of these days" project ideas: duct-tape a correlator to an RF front end, along with enough storage to "Tivoize" the local FM band. Record everything, recognize and redact any content that reoccurs within 30-second windows, and rebroadcast it for household/car consumption.

They went about it differently but already made it, it's called Spotify.

An even better idea, if you're preferential to radio DJs: have a recording setup and Shazam-like recognition system where a Spotify playlist or queue is made from what's being played. I was considering doing that as a project. The song choice by the radio DJs is the real value, and I sometimes prefer their playlists over my recommended daily mix playlists or whatever Spotify selects on the generated radio stations. The highest streaming quality option on Spotify is superior in audio quality to regular radio and the digital streaming options from radio websites. StationHead has been trying to do something similar, but they still include the social live host aspect.

Aren't the song titles usually broadcast along as metadata, and broadcast on web players?

Not often enough or reliably enough, and not on every station. It would help but you'd still need Shazam.

Pandora you mean?

It’s crazy: they used to be just music, but when they bought XM they adopted XM’s model of announcements and such. Why?

Of course that company should have cornered “digital music on the internet” but we’re themselves stuck in the radio mindset.

Long before home computers were affordable, in a magazine for electronics hobbyists, I saw a design for an analogue circuit that could, it was claimed, remove advertising and DJ waffling from radio broadcasts. I think it just looked for the frequent short periods of silence that occur in speech so it can't have been very reliable. But it had a certain low-tech beauty.

I once had an ‘Intempo Rebel’ radio[1], about a decade ago, which had the selling point that it would record songs, from radio, as MP3, without any ads or DJs. It actually worked, from what I remember. It was magic to me at the time, and …still is.

Edit: it appears that its original name was PopCatcher [2], by a company with the same name

[1] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/intempo-rebel-review/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PopCatcher

This is something modern AI could easily do. And it could go further: It could have 20 or so tuners built in (FM tuners are cheap) and constantly be scanning/listening for non-commercials/non-talk and songs in the genres you like.

Yeah, that's what I mean -- snarf up the whole 20 MHz-wide FM band and decode/analyze/edit/rebroadcast each channel concurrently in nearby unused channels. I'm sure there's a GNU Radio block somewhere that does the capture part already.

I built something like this, but, only for commercials, using RTL-SDR dongles and intel NUC's.

I never did figure out a way to monetize it, but, the thought was to that if you were pepsi, you could be alerted for coke's new commercials on a per-market or per-station basis, depending on how you wanted to pay for it.

I ended up turning the hardware into my P25 decoder for Hamilton County (currently running at https://cvgscan.iwdo.xyz ), but, I would kinda love to get back into that space again.

Very cool. I did something similar for SmartNet trunking years ago, only it used a dedicated fat client. I stopped working on it when people were getting serious about rebanding and encrypted P25 in my area. Several years later, that still hasn't happened.

And yes, to be perfectly clear, what I had in mind was for removing commercials automatically. I was complaining about mindless DJ patter in my post, but that's not an issue on FM anymore. It's either not that mindless in the case of stations like KEXP, or it's nonexistent thanks to the Clear Channelization of everything else on the dial. In any case, I have no idea how I'd go about removing it reliably. Skipping repetitive commercials is a rudimentary DSP exercise, but skipping random DJ diarrhea would be an open-ended ML problem.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the obvious solution would be to keep repetitive segments lasting at least ~3 minutes, and discard the rest. If I did it the way I was originally thinking about, I might still hear the commercial the first time it aired. But if I did it this way, I'd never hear any commercials at all, and would only miss the first appearance of a new song if I happened to be listening at the time.

$5/month is just an introductory price, after the first year it goes way up, to $16.99/month. A cheaper "Mostly Music" is $10.99/month with a reduced 80 channels (looks like nothing I'd miss) that is satellite only, no streaming over the Internet.

I've liked listening to a handful of channels on Sirius XM when it's already been enabled in rental cars but it's not worth the price.

When you call to cancel they'll give you 6 months for $5 a month. I've been going through this for a few years now.

AM radio stations work for me, none of the twaddle and blather that you experience on FM stations. There's also a lot more productive content on AM radio.

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