Radio Garden | Hacker News Reader

Radio Garden

radio.garden

232 pointsLeoPanthera54 comments

Previous discussions:

Radio Garden - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40887359 - July 2024 (64 comments)

Radio Garden - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30441847 - Feb 2022 (34 comments)

Listen to radio stations from around the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138529 - Feb 2021 (32 comments)

Radio Garden – Explore live radio by rotating the globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23477771 - June 2020 (123 comments)

Google Earth for live radios - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18427701 - Nov 2018 (98 comments)

Radio Garden – Listen to world radio by navigating an interactive globe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164058 - Dec 2016 (114 comments)

Radio Garden - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13160450 - Dec 2016 (4 comments)

Let's use this to share our favourite stations.

Shonan Beach FM, based in Japan. 'Lofi Japanese jazz', I guess? When I lived in a house with a HomePod I had a shortcut hey Siri, Shonan Beach! that was activated most mornings. This was on all day as a low-volume background track. Love it.

https://radio.garden/listen/shonan-beach-fm-78-9/qg9qo6VR

(I was in Australia, timezone-adjacent. YMMV if you're connecting at 03:00 Tokyo time. Also they do a lot of talking on the weekends.)

Interesting, I haven't heard of this station before, but most of the Shonan area has the vibe of a surf village so the music pretty much matches that vibe. Sounds like a station I'll visit more often.

Or https://shonanbeachfm.out.airtime.pro:8000/shonanbeachfm_a if you want to use a web radio app like https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.y20k.transistor/ etc.

One unfortunate property of radio.garden is it doesn’t give you the actual stream links (IIRC it proxies the M3Us through its own server), because lock-in I guess? I’d be happy to be proven wrong here, because the site is otherwise excellent.

I came upon a French-language radio station catalogue a while ago, and that did have the original links, but I’ve lost the tab since then :( ETA: It was https://www.programmes-radio.com/en/streaming/, and I was misremembering: they don’t show the original playlist link either, but they do use it in their streaming widget, so it’s a only short trip to the Network tab of the browser’s devtools away.

Thanks! I typically access through Apple Music, which itself goes via TuneIn. Not a delightful experience, but the only one that works on a HomePod.

AFAIK the https://www.skytune.net/ portal gives you the original .mp3/aac/m3u ... adresses

Hello I'm the developer of programmes-radio.com (but non-French people should probably use https://www.radio-addict.com instead) (also the website is open source, https://github.com/conradfr/ProgRadio/)

I don't show the streaming links but it's not for lock-in but because I've never got that request :) You can just look them up using developer tools though (same for radio-garden). Not ideal on mobile I guess.

I haven't look at what radio.garden does but I proxy some http only streams that don't work well when requested from an https audio element, maybe that's what you're referring to.

A lot of Icecast/Shoutcast streams either lack HTTPS support, or they don't have CORS headers, or not the right CORS headers.

Like a very common issue is - if you don't have an access control allow headers header for icy-metaint - you can't pull out the embedded Shoutcast metadata client-side. You now have to pull now-playing type data via some other method, like polling the Icecast API - which may not be available. A lot of servers don't send any CORS headers, some only send the allow-origin header.

In theory stream producers can use Ogg to encapsulate the stream and use bitstream chaining to have in-band metadata. That limits the codecs to Vorbis/Opus/FLAC, which are all great codecs - bigger issue tends to be how the browser handles chained bitstreams in audio elements. My understanding is - they just don't handle it at all.

So - if the goal is to play the streams in the browser and ensure you have a consistent experience, it makes sense to proxy them all into some common format like HLS and serve it over HTTPS. You can have timed ID3 metadata, and eliminate CORS and mixed-media issues. This does mess with the stream's ability to accurately measure things like, how many people are listening.

I wanted to listen to radio from Iran for obvious political reasons but there doesn't seem to be any on Radio Garden.

So I listened to some radio from Iraq since it was next door, and it was a music station, and the music was really good. I couldn't understand the lyrics but it was very enjoyable.

I've been enjoying Punnagai radio for a few months: https://radio.garden/listen/punnagai-radio/WU8eJqek

I don't know much about Indian/Tamil music, but it's catchy.

I was fully expecting a radio station in Tamil Nadu, but this one's in Sri Lanka. I know there's a lot of Tamil people in Sri Lanka, but that's still pretty interesting!

Glad you discovered Indian Music :)

- the road home FM/"Bob and the dogs" it's a mixture of poetry and song from a guy that lives in the Canadian wilderness, talks in a very soothing manner

- the wave from Vancouver CA (also Soma FM underground 80s). It's a new wave station that plays some very deep cuts from artists that also had radio play in the 80s. I thought I basically heard all 80s alt rock and new wave songs but this station at least doubled it for me.

- CKIA from Quebec City. It's a very diverse program, sat and sun mornings they have chamber music that is very relaxing.

https://radio.garden/listen/shirley-spinoza-radio/BgoQjOjJ

Thank you for that suggestion. Great discovery!

I like to go there from time to time to listen to languages I do not know.

Then I look at the place on Google street view (or satellite view of not available). And try to imagine the life of people there.

Then I go to Wikipedia to read about the place and then this is the end: I spend over or two hours reading randomly about loosely related topics.

Serendipity is a wonderful thing

This sounds like a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.

I've been using Radio Garden for years.

A tip that took me a while is you have to click the place name for larger locations to get a list of all stations.

Try music from Dakar, Senegal or Guinea-Bissau. Super funky music. There used to be a station called Radio Gumbe, but I can't find it any more.

I'd love a plugin to MS Flight Sim 2020 which would play a local radio station as I fly over any location in the world.

The worst part is having the immersion interrupted by localized ads for a US car dealer, credit card or VPN service. I guess one could pass custom location information to Radio Garden however...

I also find this so good to get context on the opinion on the US from outside the US, listening to call-in radio news shows from the UK, for example.

Also:

https://radioparadise.com

https://radiooooo.com

https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/ (not really radio, but also on my bookmarks)

If we're doing "not really radio" I'm gonna tack on https://www.radioisaforeigncountry.org/

Radiooooo has the most annoying popup "Sign up now!" dialog ever. It literally appears every time I click on the web page. Hard pass for me.

My ad blocker seems to deal with that fine - but it is not really the one I like best, except that one or two stations are easier to find.

https://directory.shoutcast.com/ is still kicking :)

EDIT: I meant whiping the llamas ass!

I've used Radio Garden for years to help with language learning. In English language communication I can't stand the ads one bit. But in another language even those are an opportunity for practice.

so true! hahaha

This is genius. I've enjoyed Radio Garden on occasion for the musical novelty but never thought about putting a random station in Latin America on to practice listening to different Spanish accents.

Thanks! One note is that if you're listening to a country's flagship broadcaster - like BBC - they will use a standardized form of the language in their news, etc. I find those stations are best for learning the official tongue in a clear, systematic way. But if you're advanced enough to want more conversational and informal forms - you mention learning different Spanish accents - non-flagship broadcasters might have more of that.

Of course the news on any station is going to use more formal language, and the entertainment programming even on the flagship is going to use less formal. Just, the talk station from a flagship broadcaster - like BBC Radio 4 - is going to have the most bang for your buck in language instruction.

Seems obvious, but bears mention. Enjoy!

Love this site. Also see tv.garden

It's remarkable to me that TV Garden has BBC channels from the UK. Except for World/News, those channels are not (supposed to be) available outside the UK. I wonder how they're getting them.

looks like just a load of dodgy iptv links

Shhhhh ;-)

Their about page says they source the IPTV information from https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv

Huh, the geolocation on this is surprisingly good. I did not allow the browser to use my current location and it perfectly detected the city I'm in. Most of the time IP based geolocation places me in a nearby larger city, presumably one where my ISP has an exchange.

Likely your IP is dynamic and changed into some address they have more accurate data on

Anyone looking for a commercial-free, listener-supported "radio" station would be remiss not to check out https://radioparadise.com -- it is truly a rare-gem in our over-commercialized world.

And we can't talk about music streaming on the Internet without mentioning one of the originals -- https://somafm.com -- still going strong.

I support both of these stations because their "business model" is so refreshing, very much in the spirit of the "Old Internet," which I miss dearly.

Nice app. I found a radio from the town nearby. Never heard about it. I even like the music they are playing.

On the bad side, this is an app which is very difficult to use with uMatrix because it loads JS from the domain of the selected radio and it must be whitelisted. Ok for sparse areas but apparently big cities return a different radio each time (or I didn't zoom it far enough.) I don't know if this is a solvable problem server side. Probably not because what can they do? Run a headless browser and stream the content, one browser per connection? That would be asking too much. I'll whitelist the stations I like most.

Thanks for site.

What an absolutely lovely webapp! I have loved listening to far away stations since early childhood, when I built antennas in the garden to catch far away waves....

A feature I've requested (no response, paid membership) is to hide radio stations. This is because I like to trial each radio station in a region before I favourite it. It's difficult to keep track of which station I've trialled if there's no way to hide them or leave a note on them. Hiding them from the map would be most effective.

+1 this sounds great.

Related: I'm working on Radiobird https://radiobird.fm/en ...focus is on bookmarking *shows* or *parts of a program* instead of the stations. More a modular / interest based approach to the radio world.

Intriguing. I think the link to the Android app is broken?

Thank you! An yes, you're right. I had problems with updates in the play store... have to fix this

Weirdly I'm getting "stations outside the UK unavailable". (I'm based in the UK.)

yup me too, which really defeats the point somewhat :(

This was discussed previously, but this is because of a court case that Warner Music and Sony brought against radio streaming app TuneIn Radio. They argued that streaming stations outside of the UK for listeners inside the UK through the app, while using in-app advertising, was a copyright infringement.

This has had a chilling effect on other radio streaming platforms, which have all restricted foreign radio stations on their platforms while geolocated inside the UK.

https://www.mishcon.com/news/court-of-appeal-upholds-copyrig...

Block the https://radio.garden/api/geo URL in ublock origin

Gotta give the creators some credit for their 2-foot high wall ;-)

I use this to listen to radio from my home city, it really helps sooth the feeling of homesickness.

I’m very curious about how this is implemented to play radio stations from all over the world.

Me as well. My best guess is that someone found various streamed radio sources from around the world and put them in a database. Add lat/long and you can present a UI on top of that.

I'd like to reproduce the concept if anyone has any better insight than what I just gave. I want to make a stand-alone device (I wish they made spherical touch screens) so I can just have a "radio" in a room that allows you to select world streams. (Thinking etch-a-sketch style controls would be adequate — user moves a cursor along latitude, longitude with the knobs — radio stations appear when the cursor is near.)

I wonder if they scripted it for the US, by ingesting a list of FCC licensed stations and writing a crawler that finds their website and audio streams?

How do they get all this data? Do they plant receivers all over the world?

No need. Radio stations have Internet music streams..

Interesting, but I assume there are some stations which don't?

I don't know what radio.garden uses but for my radio streaming site I mostly use https://www.radio-browser.info/ that I actually discovered on Hacker News.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com