Show HN: Radio - My first Mac app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Radio - My first Mac app

radioformac.com

63 pointsdglancy57 comments

You might also want to add the fantastic stations over at Intergalactic FM, some of the best electronic music on (and off) Earth:

https://intergalacticfm.com/

Added.

It would be nice to see a list of radio stations you currently support on your website before purchasing.

That's a good idea. Will try and get that up there.

Done @ http://www.radioformac.com/stations.html

I'm sure public radio stations would love it if you integrated some sort of donations thang into Radio so that listeners can directly donate to {{station}}.

Nice app! Although it suffers from the same problem that iTunes has, when playing a radio stream: I have a very unstable DSL internet connection, the connection drops every 2-3h for a few seconds or more. It's like unplugging the network cable for 5 seconds and re-plugging it in. So when the internet connection drops, it says "buffering" forever, so I have to manually click stop and play to resume the stream. Would be very nice, if the app would automatically try to reconnect (i.e. restart the TCP connection) after short timeout, or something like that.

As a workaround to the missing media keys support because Apple won't allow it: You could provide a little AppleScript interface, so that everyone could configure own global shortcuts with FastScripts. If that makes sense. Don't know if that's possible to implement.

Oh, thats really annoying. I don't have a fantastic connection myself at home. I'll look to use link conditioner to see if I can make re-connect more aggressive and try and solve your issue. Would be great if you hit us up on support email (via our site) and I can send you on development beta's to see if we're moving in the right direction.

Applescript know in place @ http://www.radioformac.com/#mediakeys

Thanks for the suggestion.

That's great, thanks!

When clicking the "add new station" button on the favourites tab, I would expect the newly added station to appear in my favorites (as well as the stations tab).

It doesn't - After adding it (on the favourites tab), I have to go to the stations tab, search for it (which causes UI lag), then mark it a favourite.

Also: lose the spaces between the labels and the ellipsis ("...") on the edit and delete buttons.

Also: Make the "Ok" button the default (enter) on the add new station pane

Great feedback thanks. Agree with it all and working on the UI lag issue.

Lots of UI lag when typing the first character into the "all stations" filter/search field, and again when deleting the last character remaining.

Yes, this is the only "bad" thing I find with the application. Hopefully it gets fixed.

Looks very similar to Radium : http://catpigstudios.com/

It is a bit. Menubar radio players will all seem similar. I was a Radium user myself. It was the "record" function of this app that prompted me to make it. I wanted to record radio shows, budget speeches and a specific Dutch trance music show I listen to and I couldn't find an easy way to do that. There were ways, but nothing one-click and resident on the menu bar.

Can you explain how recording works? Do you parse the song title and cut a new MP3 whenever it changes?

Right now, we don't do that. Its just a simple MP3 file that lasts for as long as you are recording a station. The problem with parsing the song title is that firstly, not all stations support it, and secondly, a lot of stations will push the station name into the stream at periodic intervals. It would make cutting up a continuous stream into accurate individual songs quiet troublesome.

But for some well behaved stations, its doable, if people wanted it enough.

It's substantially cheaper (30%), if indeed it does the same thing and works as well.

Via Little Snitch, I noticed it contacts your radioformac.com webserver on port 80 on launch. I didn't sniff the traffic but presumably this is for a list of stations or something?

Could you please update to use SSL/TLS (https) instead? It's for the server authentication, not so much the transit security.

Indeed it is to get latest stations. I will update to SSL.

Bought it, works great :)

Might like to see description listed next to stations in the fav list drop down from menu bar.

(edit: also, sort by description in All Stations list doesn't work: http://cl.ly/image/3l3M030n1D2m)

Seems great. Can I suggest you add this list of stations? http://www.abc.net.au/radio/listenlive.htm#shoutcastaac

Australians will be forever grateful

Will defo do that. Radio connects to a plist file on startup so we can push new stations to it. Thanks for the links.

Getting a decent list of stations was one of the most frustrating aspects of the project. That and catering for WMA based streams.

Just added to Radio - relaunch to get them immediately otherwise they will show up in the next 24 hours.

My main issue with Radium is that it does not support the play/pause/fast-forward/rewind keys on my MacBook. Does Radio support these?

It does not at the moment. And not from the want of trying! Unfortunately the App Store sandbox does not yet allow you to detect the media keys being pressed. The old way of doing it uses a very low-level function that is not available for security reasons (its essentially a key logger) within the sandbox..

Its common problem across all App Store apps, for now. Drives me crazy as well!

That's a shame. Perhaps someone needs to build a small library that exists outside of the App Store that notifies App Store apps when those keys are pressed. :P

This reason alone is what keeps me using VLC for radio playlists.

This seems like a great idea. Build some sort of universal bridge for media keys that any compatible app can hook into? Or would the OS X sandbox prevent that, too?

It is a great idea and should be possible so long as Apple is willing to approve an sandboxed app that accepts incoming connections (listens) on a port against the local interface.

The bridge could be the listener, and the sandboxed apps could open a connection to it. This is probably preferable design anyway.

The apps should request subscription to a set of keypress events, the bridge should get approval from the user (maybe only if the app requests keys other than F keys and media keys?). The bridge should be discoverable by local bonjour rather than running on a known port.

I asked this question of the radium devs. I was told that its an App Store limitation. Apple will not approve third party apps that use the media keys.

Not only not approve, it physically won't work. The sandbox enforced partially at a kernel level will prevent the necessary low-level functions from working.

Interesting use of "physically".

Are you considering adding alarm support to wake the mac and play a radio station in the morning? I would love a reliable mac program to do this!

Is it possible for non-apple developers to integrate with AirPlay? Because that would be a really nice feature to have!

It is and its on our list (actually its on a git branch). Just didn't make it across the line for v1.

As a stop gap we have this in our FAQ:

Radio currently doesn't directly support Airplay.

However, if you'd really like to stream Radio via Airplay, here is a trick you can use:

Hold the Alt-key and click on the Volume icon in the menu bar, a menu will appear showing any available Airplay device. Select your Airplay device and all your sounds will play over Airplay.

In the Appleverse, we call it Option, not Alt.

(I know the key says "alt" too, but it's smaller type for a reason.)

Fixed!

Why the Mountain Lion requirement? What tech. are you using that is present in OS X 10.8 only?

Objective-C literals, that's all.

Love the app. One feature request: add scheduled recording (one-off, repeating, etc.)

Does it support FLAC streams?

Not at the moment, but possible in future. Can you let me know of an example stream?

Okay, good to head. Unfortunately I don't know of any public ones, no.

I don't think Rdio is going to like this. http://www.rdio.com

I doubt Rdio would be able to do anything about an app named "Radio".

Fuck'em

I was pretty pleased that Apple had no issue with the name!

US Patent and Trademark Office won't have any issue as well. Consider to apply.

I struggle to believe you can trademark 'Radio' for a radio app - it's completely generic.

fantastic. May I ask, what was your reasoning for calling it such a generic name?

Sure. Nothing sneaky or anything like that. We were of course tossing around app names. Anything but "iRadio" :-)

Nothing was sticking and people were asking me how we were getting on with the "Radio" personal project. I always kinda of imagined the project as making a menubar radio player that "should have shipped with my Mac". So when we noticed that "Radio" itself was available in the App Store, it just resonated with us and stuck.

And getting {radioformac dot com} was just plain luck. Cost us €5.99. Try getting any dot com domain with radio in the word is just nuts. So again, we saw that as a sign!

Love it, own it. Thank you!

Looks awesome.

Nice! Thanks!

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