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Discovered SomaFM thanks to HN and in love with the SF 10-33 (SF police scanner mixed with ambient).

For those of you loving the “deeply-focused and manually curated music channel” vibe, I can only recommend to check out Digitally Imported (di.fm), which I started listening for free and turned into a paying user for years now. They now own many apps, each featuring its own music style (electronic music, jazz, classical, rock, zen, etc.).

Some live shows are popping up from time to time, adding a bit of “social experience” on top, but the overall feeling I have is exactly the same as the people commenting there: what a pleasure to just log on a very specialized channel fitting your current listening needs and only have quality sounds fulfilling those needs. No add, no commercial tune, no fuss: only rare versions of quality music organized in extremely consistent channels.

Friends at home for a relaxed moment? Why not tuning to “Late night jazz”? Aggressive repetitive coding: “Goa Psy Trance” will put you in the proper “copy-paste” mood. Long driving session: “Deep progressive” that is!

Apart from pleasing your ears, the valuable outcome (at a time of AI-propelled tracklists that will only push you to listen to the same mainstream music as your neighbours) is that you’ll gradually build a sense of what you like exactly, and when you like it exactly.

DI.fm is no longer freely listenable, they severely limited the free offering.

DI.fm feels like they are going to just fold at any time. They had a big three day outage a month or two back. They couldn't be bothered with any kind of redundancy in their infrastructure and a single podunk datacenter outage took them out.

None of their channels that I listen to have had playlist changes in the last three years.

I removed my autorenew a few months back and my subscription is finally going to end here in just a week or two, but I've not really been listening anyway. I've been buying albums and going through my list of artists that I've wanted to check out for awhile and getting my listening done that way.

I somehow periodically forget about these stations so this post and this comment also reminded me that there is also dfm.nu - not universal as di.fm or somafm, but still interesting.

Their genre specific channels swing quite far into other genres. I stopped paying and listening due to repeated disappointment. I dont recommend di.fm as an 2 year x subscriber

Re: SF 10-33 Soma channel Many groups are fighting against cities encrypting their police radio channels based on government transparency and freedom of information grounds. I'm like, more importantly, it hurts the SF 10-33 channel.

Thanks for the reminder! I’ve been listening to this since sometime in the late 90s early 2000s. I spent so much time focused because of this, and it became a formative part of my music taste in high school.

I am a downtempo person so classic Groove Salad kept me going.

SomaFM got me through 9/11

I had moved to a new city about a year before the event. No work, no friends, money dwindling, and suddenly the world went bananas… my most vivid memories of that period was hours of reading about anthrax and bin Laden and groove salad and that secret agent station.

I picked up the habit again during the lockdown.

I've been grooving to Groove Salad for decades now. Every morning I boot up Webamp (Winamp clone) on my website with SomaFM's playlist and the Butterchurn (Milkdrop clone) visualization in desktop mode. Hope to do it for decades to come.

Same here. 2-3 years back, after looking all over for some less conventional EM, I tried cliqHop IDM. (I ignored the 'IDM' ... a bit of a pejorative). Depending on who puts the segment together, it can be really great for hours.

If you enjoy some the following names, the show's description says:

"Typical artists include: Telefon Tel Aviv, Boards Of Canada, Autechre, Aphex Twin, Mu-ziq, Black Dog, Cex, Ulrich Schnauss, and Album Leaf.

For variety and quality, SOMA has consistently been a great resource. Good to see this recognized here.

Love SomaFM! The defcon channel has seen me through countless hours of intense coding. I donate every year of course. Thank you!!

FTW SomaFM been listening for about 13 years now! The trip and secret agent <3

Space Station Soma!

I don’t think it’s as useful as somafm but In a similar vein, JetBrains fired out an email a few weeks ago with links to some Spotify and YouTube playlists they curated for coding.

You’d need to be using paid subscriptions or something like SponsorBlock in your browser so you didn’t constantly get jarred out of flow by adverts.

It’s still in my inbox I just haven’t got around to checking it out yet so not sure if it’s any good.

A Quick Look just now e.g. https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ176FUIyIUa1dA8101... - suggests it might not be for me. The only genre that seems to work for me is video game music (elevated energy but with no vocals and limited beats).

I also enjoy coding to video game music. I try to recall my days of spending hours, super-focused, in Japanese arcades, when I'm coding.

Thankfully works with Web Scrobbler [1] too.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/web-scrobbler/hhina...

Scrobbles... reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR8az1UMOiQ

Can someone shed light on why the fundraising goals are so high? Is it because of music licenses? I cannot imagine the hosting fees being that much.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was licensing fees. You could always try emailing them, too :) https://somafm.com/contact/

Exactly this. Rusty has to pay ASCAP, BMI, GMR, & SESAC licensing fees. Oh, and SF rent and taxes on an office in the Mission district. I’d hope he also pays himself a good salary.

Just a post because I feel like it's been a while. I dunno what their finances are like but I panic at the thought of them not being here some day.

Consider donating and if you don't listen, check. it. out.

Some of my favorite beats of all time I found while listening. The Trip (formerly Tag's Trip) has always been a top all-time coding sound for me.

There are still a handful of us from the TTT IRC around. I asked Tag for a copy of his archive during the pandemic and put it on S3 if there are any tracks you are looking for from the old days.

TTT IRC?

Tag's Trance Trip internet relay chat.

I'm a listener for heaven knows how long, should be close to 20, writing this while being tuned into Space Station. My PhD thesis' epigraph was from a song that I listened way to many times on Secret Agent or Groove Salad. One of my first IoT project was deploying a SomaFM player remotely to a Raspberry Pi. Back in the day 2nd hand CDs from Amazon, now I regularly search on Bandcamp for something I just heard on one of the channels, and voila, have a larger album collection from there than ever before. Such strong influence on my musical taste.

Thank you Rusty! https://defcon.social/@SomaFMrusty

I think my t-shirt is getting worn out, it's time to get some more swag.

Well, if people feel that way then they better donate.

I squarely blame this post that I'm all hung up on sofaFM now.

They have a very handy Mac app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/somafm-radio-player/id40626281...

Maybe one of the ways to support them.

that's iOS/iPadOS app

but it runs on ARM/M1 and up Macs, yes

(developer of the app has to explicitly enable this)

i think i bought it twice since they discontinued prev. version IIRC

Here is the native Mac app: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/somafm-radio-player/id44915533...

Thanks for sharing this. I didn't know about it, and it fits my mood right now.

Don't be too pessimistic, there are always better things to come

Shoutcast used to be such a hugely vibrant wild scene of so many things happening. And tons of it was all ad free or nearly so. There is an order magnitude less going on, and it's much more commercialized now. I don't think there are great replacements.

Somafm was such a a particularly great example, of having a specific vibe. Many of them! Suburbs of Goa is probably my favorite; good energy & beats mixing.

damn - what a throwback - i completely forgot about shoutcast! (how could i!?)

The reality of capitalism

Different things, sure, but not always better.

The fundamental delusion of capitalism

look all the nice things you could have enjoyed are destroyed in the name of money, but will you please think of the increased shareholder value

Why don't you start a nice free thing for us to enjoy freely.

It's not about things being free. Money exists without capitalism. This is my biggest gripe with people who label any criticism of capitalism as a some socialist agenda. The cold war has been over for decades. Move on.

Looks great! Can’t wait to try working while listening to it

Thanks for sharing, I love this.

Wish they supported Apple Pay.

Wish they would accept bitcoin donations...

Based Soma.FM fans.

Rocking a handful of mugs I got from Dusty over the years.

Did you mean Rusty?

Dusty is Rusty’s Boot Liqueur alter ego.

Thanks for introducing me to this, Gonna listen to it today !

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