RadioSide turns your spare device into a radio | Hacker News Reader

RadioSide turns your spare device into a radio

radioside.com

107 pointsAlexDragusin75 comments

Turns your device into a radio... And then you see a bunch of comments talking about IPs.

This has a "download more ram" ring to it. You cannot download hardware. This in no way shape or form transforms your device into a radio. It's an app to listen to internet streams... you know, cos phones have a really hard time with that

Blocking IPs from Mexico

Always boggles my mind why people do things like this.

They'll take but not give, I hit random and this played: POP FM (CDMX) - Online - www.popfm.mx - Ciudad de México - Mexico

I can't tell if it doesn't play because my device is slightly older (macOS Big Sur) or if my IP is blocked because of Cloudflare.

Nice idea, though.

Blocking IPs from Brazil :/

Heh, I hit random a few times and bumped into #126577, some radio station in the US, and it reminded me why I stopped listening to the (free/open) radio.. so many ads it ruined it for me.

I got lucky and got BBC first, followed by a few random stations (Russia, India), and ended up listening to drum & bass on a French radio. I miss discovering music like this!

If you are interesting in geographically finding stations http://radio.garden/ is great

Great if you're not in the UK :(

Try the free VPN built into Opera Browser.

Free radio, 0 ads, guaranteed (good) music discoveries everyday: fip.

https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip

If by 'radio' you mean 'streamcast receiver' then yes, I guess.

Indeed, it started as I wanted to interact with the streams in a more classic radio fashion and to be able to repurpose some of the old devices. It's not perfect but it works.

The basic disadvantage of that design is that a real radio or TV can change channels in milliseconds, but it takes seconds to set up a digital stream in most cases.

Thus the interface of “changing channels” by rapidly pushing buttons is not so pleasing for a streaming-based player as it is for the real thing which is why Netflix provides the search and browsing interface it has.

You are correct.

On the technical side, there is actually a way to make it to instantly switch (also fairly easy to implement) but it will consume more data (about 5x-10x) which would not go well with the efficiency of using a spare device concept. I had to consider these matters.

Might be worth considering a switch for this? I think a lot of people wouldn't care about the data, but the switching time is a little annoying at the moment.

I care about the data. I live in the woods with WiFi internet. Every byte matters.

Of course. I'm just suggesting an optional switch so that people who don't care about bandwidth have a better experience

> The basic disadvantage of that design is that a real radio or TV can change channels in milliseconds, but it takes seconds to set up a digital stream in most cases.

Only for tuned stations. If you’re scanning the frequency (which is what the up and down arrow remind me more of) then it will take as long as it takes for your tuner to find the next station along. And that’s assuming you even have an automatic tuner, my first radio could only be manually tuned and didn’t support presets.

> The basic disadvantage of that design is that a real radio or TV can change channels in milliseconds, but it takes seconds to set up a digital stream in most cases.

Real TV is all mpeg transport streams these days. Maybr you can tune in milliseconds, but you can't decode until you get a keyframe.

You can still decode starting at a non-keyframe, and just apply the diffs to the current picture, although the results might not be understandable; VLC is known for doing this when seeking.

That's a good point. I take for granted that I remember well what it was like in the analog age. Channels could be changed in what must've been around 30 milliseconds.

I always found a modicum of latency to be generally acceptable in something like TV tuning once it went digital. Streaming doesn't really offer anything with that kind of experience anymore. Even analog car radios tend to have digital tuners with their own degrees of tuning delay.

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel"

Can't remember where I saw this pointed out, but this Gibson quote from neuromancer won't make any sense to anyone young enough to have not been exposed to analog TV. And most radios by default do channel scan, so you aren't even exposed to audio static as much anymore either.

Actual radios connected to the internet http://www.websdr.org/

Please add support to link to specific station.

Thank you for you the suggestions, I thought of it initially, but haven't gone with it since no one asked, now you're the first asking for this so will consider.

brill - love the search by keyword - always amazes me how many christmas stations there are

one small improvement is a tick box to only show/ play live streams - and not keep showing the endless offline stations

Yes, that's still an issue and the solution implementation is in progress so eventually offline stations should be an exception.

The difficulty comes from the fact that the station numbers have to be preserved even if removing the offline stations else it will mess up the presets people have saved, imagine you've saved BBC and next time when you load it, it plays Jazz.

Could a "show only live streams" be implemented only with in the KTM search results?

the offline stations will still be there and have number, just not shown in the KTM results - a list of the KTM results would also be very handy, but that would probably change the feel a little

I have a streaming webapp as a side project and Christmas channels are kinda popular all year round, while many of those stations actually shut down between the holidays.

Nice idea and I love the aesthetics.

Would be fun if you could play static sound while the other stations are buffering. But that might be one feature too far for some of the younger users.

Thank you!

The first version of it, had the static implemented however, it was rather erratic and decided to scrap it to avoid much confusion since it did not behave as expected. For example the static would stop while buffering of a stream thus you would end up with static then sudden silence the stream which is worse especrience than just silence in between the switching.

I was thinking the static sound would only play during the buffering. I don't know how easy that is to implement though

(Without looking at the product) I think you'd want to cross fade the static out with the content in. Maybe even use static as an indicator of available buffer... more static as the buffer gets low, etc.

Or just not probably works fine though.

Thank you for your work. I like this work very much. It meets the requirements of no ads and comprehensive collection. Excellent work.

I dig it. Just from clicking "random" a bunch of times I'm able to stumble upon (web) radio stations from across the globe.

Would be nice to have some kind of listing of all the available stations and their "frequencies". I also can't find any info on how to submit stations.

It's fun, the URL could include the radio station name and frequency so it can be shared.

Yes, someone made a similar suggestion and will consider implementation in the future.

Cool concept, but desperately needs display of the currently playing song/program name!

The current song won't work due to the stations not providing such through the <audio> tag, which is used to play the stream. Would loved that as well and when I designed it, was something I expected to be possible but then not with the current setup. If a solution becomes available to this effect, would definitelly implement it right away.

Most radio stations do provide ‘now playing’ info on their website. I acknowledge that it would be a lot of work to collate all these data sources, though.

Many do broadcast the data (shoutcast protocol). I do parse the data server side but I think you can do it client side by using hls.js [0]

Added bonus you can read HLS and MPD streams.

[0] https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/issues/5706

Thanks, went through this also before launch, after implementation I was browsing stations and one started playing video :) Thats when I put HLS aside and will explore more once I can have certainty that video streams will not be part of it. Even if I hide the video, the data transfer would not be acceptable. It's unfortunate as the HLS streams start playing nearly instantly so it would been a better experience.

Yes adding style="display:none" to your audio or video element works but will consume bandwidth.

https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/issues/3480

I really like this, especially the UI - I'll ping a donation. Would it be possible to get a nice icon for us iDevice users rather than just an "R"?

As a designer, I can surely make a nice icon, let me see what I can do.

Try now, it should have a nice icon showing up.

Oh yes, very nice and looks good on my Android phone too! Is there a donation option?

It does indeed.

Thank you, there is no donation option, it's a side project I enjoy doing to give me some of that "stumbling on new stations" feel you get on a real radio and sharing the same with the world.

For people who might want to work with me, I am available for brand identity design work through https://www.ypson.com (this allows me to build cool side projects like this and not worry about monetization).

Enjoy the radio! :)

Inspired by your question, I end up adding a donation option :) Thanks again!

Great! I'll test it today

Seems it went through nicely, thank you once again for your support :)

This is really cool. Feels completely different from the way we consume music now through Spotify... love the exposure to music from across the world!

Where do you get the stream urls from?

The database has been built using data from https://www.radio-browser.info/

If anyone can recommend a better more comprehensive database source, would love to use it.

Nice, the excellent open source android app RadioDroid also uses radio browser.

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

In my experience I haven't found it to be lacking any stations.

But the nice thing is I think anyone can just submit missing stations.

You should see if they will list your app on their page for visibility: https://www.radio-browser.info/users

I have an old iPad 2 that is perfectly functioning. However my old apple ID I have on it, I known the password but have no way to unlock the account as I've forgotten the password. There's nothing Apple can do for me, so it may just become ewaste.

Perhaps something like this would be a good use. Either that or maybe I can jailbreak it and give it a breath of new life. Though I'm not too familiar with IOS, my experience is more with android.

So sad to see a perfectly good piece of hardware being obsolete due to software.

> So sad to see a perfectly good piece of hardware being obsolete due to software.

My sentiments when creating this!

Will check RadioDroid and will get in touch with radio-browser as well to see if they can list the website, thank you for the suggestion.

Radio-browser.info is fantastic but the author reluctance to work on the update problem (due to vandalism etc) and by extension the duplication problem is a bit of a shame, although I understand his position.

At least 7/10 random stations are shown as offline.

this is awesome -- ty :)

I hate this user interface

Interesting view :) May we know why is that?

Same. I have absolutely no idea how to interact with this. It expects me to enter a number, but ... this isn't actually a radio and has nothing to do with frequencies. I can't enter the frequency of a station I want and listen to it, so what's the point of numeric entry?

I can understand your side, the interface comes from the typical shortwave radio, and bridging that with the internet radio results in this. The numbers are also a construct for the same purpose, creating a numeric index similar to frequencies.

Not everyone prefers this and that's fine, there are many alternatives for everyone! :) Thanks for the feedback.

I think the problem is that people who don't have nostalgia for using real shortwave radios won't care/understand the interface, and people who DO ... will be actively annoyed by/won't understand the interface!

As a counterpoint, I really enjoyed the UI. I never really messed around with shortwave, but the UI really reminded me of the hyper-skeumorphic software that used to be more common. I didn't have an intuitive idea what all the buttons do, but the design encouraged just clicking around and experimenting to see what they do. I found it fun at least.

I did the same thing - thinking if I entered a radio frequency, it might find stations with that frequency, perhaps ordered by distance from my location. It would have been fun to see what another radio station with similar frequency to my local (or childhood) favorite, in another part of the world.

it is trying to mimic a hardware radio interface when it has nothing to do with radio. Square peg, round hole. All you need is a searchable list of stations.

Was hoping for crazy RF hackery lol -- anybody got something for that?

Haha that would been something, sorry for the disappointment :)

No, although many Androids already have an actual FM radio.

I think you want LoLRa - it's a way to transmit LoRa radio packets using nothing but IO pins https://github.com/cnlohr/lolra

OMG. Thank you for including this comment. I wasn't aware that this level of shenanigans was possible with just IO pins. This deserves its own post on Hackernews if it's not there already.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/

I think a websdr?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com