There is also an app called "radiodroid" (or maybe it is "radiodroid2"; on the https://f-droid.org app store that says it builds all the apps from free/open source) which I have very much enjoyed for this. Unlike the other 1-2 internet radio apps I tried, this one made it easy to browse thousands of stations, search by tag (I guess everything is in there), language, country, etc etc, set bookmarks, list listening history, and no annoying weirdness. Very few that I have tried had commercials, those that did were not enough to annoy: bach, beatles, ethnic, deep lounge, 1940's big band, tejano, on and on.
Edit: I also recall a nice little linux program called radiotray, on debian (that sat in the XFCE or maybe LXDE app tray / bar), that did something similar. Presumably there are others.
Edit2: I mention radiodroid and internet radio among ideas like watching news TV sites on the internet from around the world, on my simple fun/relaxation page: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854618463.html
Edit3: I tried libre.fm too (which basically seems to be an FSF initiative to flag or play favorite tracks from archive.org by category, and had high hopes, thought it had promising ideas, but though it seemed to work well at first, I later couldn't get anything to happen after I logged in, etc., and finally gave up. Mentioning in case others know better.
+1 for radio droid on android, has an alarm clock AND a sleep timer, which seems to be rare on hardware digital radios... (Even BBC sounds doesn't have an alarm clock).
If you also want to find different stations around the world there is also http://www.surfmusic.de/ which I often use for power 105.1FM in nyc, which is difficult to find a stream of here in the UK.
Heh, and I was about to mention TuneIn radio. I have been using it from 2013 to 2016. Then I switched to Spotify (premium) because I got tired of the ads in the radio stations.
RadioDroid is awesome, but the one feature I wish it has was Android Auto integration. The main place I listen to radio is in the car, and I end up falling back to TuneIn because I can change stations easily while driving.
One correction to my earlier comment, where I said there were few commercials or not enough to annoy: sometimes there are, but with so many other stations one can usually just switch to something similar, it seems. I made a list of "favorites" and there were plenty to choose from, even tabernacle choir music, Russian spiritual music, etc.
There is an option on the top right with icon of a black "record player" for uploading a song from an audio file. You might have to make an free account with an email.
I used this service a couple of years ago to listen to the local radio station from my home city.
It's indescribable how homesick it made me, but at the same time I felt so much more connected to my home after hearing the local news, and my regional accent which is somewhat rare.
for context; I'm British, from a city called Coventry (which does not have an accent similar its neighbours) and I live in Sweden, where everyone who speaks English sounds either American or very Swedish.
Same here, was surprised to see so many radios from my city (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and from the country side too, where they have an accent similar to my father's family. Still use radio.garden weekly, great service.
In case the developer is reading, feature requests:
(1) When browsing the list of radio stations, I can see the use of alphabetical by call letters. But the way my brain remembers radio stations is by band (AM/FM) and frequency. (Maybe it is ancient muscle memory from radios you tune with a knob.) So it would be nice to have this available as a view.
(2) In a large metro area, there are transmitters in different cities and suburbs. To get the full set of stations, I have to flip around between nearby points on a map and look at different lists. (For example, in the Bay Area, you have to click SF to get KQED then click Berkeley to get KPFA.) It would be super cool if I could click on any point on the map, then see one list of all stations that a radio at that location would pick up. Getting a completely accurate list is probably complicated (topography, weather, antenna type, etc.) but distance and maybe transmitter power would give a good approximation.
So how are all these radio stations connected to the Internet? Do all these radio stations have a server? Or is there some organization which does the broadcasting on behalf? Who pays for the streaming fees? Can I start my own station?
Can't speak for every one of these, but yeah, it's usually just an audio feed encoded and streamed out to a server that handles the streams to listeners. There are several ways to do it but I only know the way I used to do it back in the early/mid 2000's.
Back then, I had an ever-updated playlist running on WinAmp with a ShoutCast plugin. Whatever I played (or when I switched over to mic, etc.) was streamed to a ShoutCast server I had running on some storage provided by a dude I knew who was working at a small ISP. He basically said they would never care or notice that I was streaming a 128k/sec stream to maybe 5 or 10 people at a time so just go for it, heh...
That said, I could've run it from home if I wanted, but this was more stable on an early 2000's broadband connection. Otherwise, today you could probably do this with any suitable online virtual web server.
As far as streaming fees, well...if you mean bandwidth, you can see above. If you mean license fees for copyrighted material, then that's the main reason I stopped running one. Loads of these did (and still do) fly under the radar, but you're still essentially sharing media with other people, so if it's not something you have the license to broadcast or share, you have to pay to license it.
For a time, I had been looking into an ASCAP/BMI license since (terrestrial) radio doesn't really pay much at all for that. Airplay is free advertising for commercial music sales, after all. But somewhere along the line in the wake of Napster freaking the hell out of music labels, the laws were put in place to be much more restrictive on streaming radio. Instead of a relatively affordable blanket license, you also had to pay per-song-per-listener royalties. The whole thing made it cost prohibitive for amateurs to legally run a music streaming station so I just said screw it and moved on.
Of course, there's nothing stopping you from streaming something else. You can do a talk show or get license to stream local unsigned artists. You could do all sorts of things, just as people do with live video streaming. You just can't really do anything like typical FM or satellite music radio unless you wanna deal with quite a bit of licensing and expense outside of just a PC and bandwidth.
Many radio stations have a server. Many of them sign up with an organization that does it for them. Sometimes the station just pays the fees out of general revenue, and sometimes the org inserts its own ads.
You can start your own station with icecast2, GPLd and available from icecast.org
If you're willing to ignore legacy clients, you can use HTTP streaming with MPEG-DASH or HLS. These protocols chunk the stream into individual audio files of a few seconds each, which can be served from a normal HTTP server or even an S3 bucket with CloudFlare. The protocol allows better quality codecs than Shoutcast, handles dynamic bitrates, and even lets you rewind live streams. There are open source player libraries which work in all modern browsers, and some support them natively too.
I used to be user of TuneIn radio for a year or two but grew to dislike it with its newer heavier updates that you could not avoid and the pressure to go professional or whatever it's called. Now I just have bookmarks to the BBC Sounds webpage and also to the couple of other stations I listen to sometimes. It cuts out the middle man and the risk of initially great sites like this going the way of TuneIn radio and ruining the user experience.
It's crazy how similar pop music sounds from all over the world. The language differs, but the energy of the music is similar in a lot of different countries.
I wonder if this is because everyone is using digital audio workstations like Ableton or Logic now. It used to be that different places had different instruments; and it would take years to become an expert. But now, the DAW is everybody's instrument.
musicians are the ultimate cross-pollinators .. someone, somewhere will inevitably get a creative buzz from listening to something solid from somwhere else.. its not a bad thing, entirely.. different strokes for different folks .. Think about "guitars", except over the centuries.. is it a technical copying that makes the music sound the same, since it is a stringed instrument, like those other ones ? hmm It certainly could be argued that pace of interaction can lead to loss of diversity.. isolated people dont copy music styles.. big topic !
Great site! But as I clicked on music radio stations across the US, they were almost all broadcasting commercials at the time. Which is one of the fundamental problems with the format.
Yes! Freem-form WFMU is an incredible station. Though based in NJ, it has a worldwide listener base. It is entirely listener supported, without even corporate underwriting, unlike other public radio stations in the US. It also has internet accesible archives of programming that goes back into the 90's. If you have a unique musical itch, just Google that song and add WFMU as the site. Click and enjoy the playlist that pops up.
Probably because they were all owned by iHeartMedia. Outside of a few AM stations, and a college station, they own everything in my area.
I would listen to broadcast radio if DJ's were hired for their muscial knowledge, and ability to put a playlist together. But I don't think they even use local people on these stations anymore. It's just the same tired old songs with a commercial break every 6 minutes.
Like if I wanted to build my own tiny radio streaming client, where would I look for the streams?
I tried snooping the network tab in dev tools on Radio Garden, but couldn't see many requests that weren't either grabbing map tiles, or connecting to Radio Garden itself.
Strange, I tuned into a random South Africa station and the guy immediately started talking about radio garden. Coincidence? Did not sound like an advert because he immediately trailed off to talking about Netflix and some ex marine sniper stuff.
Recently, a user posted on my problem validation platform that she's unable to listen to radio from her home town (possibly rural India) from a foreign country[1].
Setting up SDR for this seems to be beyond the capacity of that user. Sites like these might address this need gap, if they allow the user to tune to specific frequency rather than being limited to particular stations[I understand that this has larger technical overhead].
P.S I checked the Radio Garden, it GeoIP's some stations, there were no prominent stations, mostly comprised of religious stations and couple of unknown hobby stations.
Something I vaguely remember reading in an app (maybe it was the "internet radio" app or its description, from https://f-droid.org?) said there is a maintained list on the internet, of stations, like maybe in xml. (edit: or maybe where I read that was about the "radiotray" linux desktop app.)
That is really neat. I'd love to see an app like this which allows surfing the globe for listening to shortwave radio. Users could report which WebSDRs (for example) are picking up which stations. Then those stations are marked as live on the globe, and you can listen to the WebSDR audio feed(s) that are picking up that station, as if you're listening on a real shortwave radio.
Maybe individual WebSDR listings could show SINPO numbers, to allow users to choose a source based on the quality level that's currently available...hmmm!
You're probably aware but I will just report it anyway.
On that link (https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/), there doesn't seem to be a lower bound limit on the 'polar angle' rotation. So I am able to rotate below the 'horizon' and look up to the earth's 'inner surface' (the concave side of the mesh). The trajectories dashed lines are still rendered and drawn on top of the earth's 'bottom' but are all glitchy and intermitent.
This maybe an issue with this specific implementation and not cesium itself but just thought you should know.
If you’d like something a bit more curated, WFMU has a show called “The Blind Tourist” which is mostly audio collage from various global radio stations.
This is great. For years I have been exploring radios around. Sometimes I add radios from my region to Radio Garden. Just send it through their form and wait to be accepted.
I just wish it was easier to export their favorites. I once lost a good list of saved radios.
I came across this a while back and had hours of fun randomly sampling radio stations around the world. The one feature I wish it had was the ability to "lock" the current station while still being able to wander around looking for another station to try
All I want is an app that I can hotkey to my main (android) screen that starts a stream with an auto-sleep timer set to some value. I currently have to click like 6 times with various wait times to listen to my nightly "sleep time" stream.
Without a timer, if your stream can be found in a url form just save a link on your homescreen. One click can start it.
For a one button solution with timer if no app is satisfactory you can build your script in Workflow (IOS) or any other automation tool on android. You might find a script already made on your liking.
I mention radiodroid elsewhere here: it has a sleep timer that defaults to the last one set, so you would have to tap first to start the app, then 2nd to start a station (at the top of your favorites), then the timer and ok, so that is 4 taps I guess.
But, oh my god, why are mainstream radios stuck with the same 10 songs since what seems like forever ? First pickup: suzanne vega, second pickup: francoise hardy.
First station I hit after moving a bit at random was A-ha's "Take On Me" followed by Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World". This was in Western Washington.
Zoomed way out and then back on somewhere in California. Got a station in Mariposa. First song was "Gentleman" by Fela Kuti, followed by "A Beautiful Story" by Sonny & Cher followed by "Big Lie, Small World" by Sting. So...1973 Nigerian afrobeat to 1967 pop to 1999 whatever the heck Sting is.
Could not figure out what that the connection was between the songs on the station, so decided to zoom out and in again, but head east a bit. See if I could find a station playing what you would stereotypically expect for its region.
Ended up at one in Jackson, WY, that was playing "Super Duper Rescue Heads!" by Deerhoof, which was followed by "Move" by CSS.
Finally, popped down to Texas, where I finally ran into the stereotypes I was looking for. Hit a sermon on a religious station, moved a bit and got some urban rap about Jesus, moved some more and got some Spanish song about Jesus, moved again and got some country/western song that was not about Jesus, and moved one final time and got a country/western song about Jesus. :-)
Try Madagascar and nearby islands. 90% of what I got there was sufficiently off the beaten path that neither Shazam nor SoundHound could tell me what it was.
It was a naming convention created in the early 1900s, using the Mississippi River as a rough line of delineation. Local TV stations use a similar convention.
The three latter letters are usually meaningful, but only barely. For example, there’s WGBH, a Boston public broadcasting station that stands for Great Blue Hills, which are the hills that the broadcasting antenna is located on.
You can request a call sign along with getting your license from the FCC. The process has changed over time, but many (most?) call signs have some sort of historical connection to something: e.g. KRON was broadcast from the SF Chronicle newspaper building, WRCT is Carnegie Mellon's University's station (originally Radio Carnegie Tech, from before it was CMU). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_signs_in_the_United_State...
It seems to go in both directions: you can ask for one that has some meaning to you (which you can then potentially get if no one is using it), or you can try to make up a backronym. I don't remember good backronym examples but I know they exist. The stations will also vary in whether they prefer for people to pronounce the whole callsign, or just part of it, or spell it out. (Technically I think the callsign is always spelled out when used as a callsign, but not necessarily when used as a brand.)
College radio is excellent for this. My favorite DJ has been on 4 hours a week for a decade, and most of the music is new to me. Half is OK in the background, there can be a handful of awful grindy noise bleh, but another bunch of it is often great, and there are amazing gems that have taken my listening off into new frontiers — from Bevis Frond to Gravitar to Mono to Expo 70.
The most common question the kids ask is: How can you listen to that? The answer is: I’m happy to listen to unfamiliar and even unpleasant music if that’s the price to discover something completely unexpected and amazing.
I listen to international radio, mostly for countries where I have previously lived (a handful). I also listen to some online radio stations, particularly Radio Paradise and soma.fm .. I've donated to both in the past.
I have Spotify, and I have about 1500 artists that I follow, but even their algos keep feeding me the same stuff all the time. And there's no "flow" between songs in "Built for you" playlists (Youtube Music, as well).
And sometimes, for certain kinds of moods, I want to listen to music where I don't understand the lyrics. International radio is great for that, even when the DJs/announcers break in and talk.
That said, I never ever listen to real radio anymore, and I'd only really do that in my car. I move around the US West a lot, and updating my radio presets for the 3-4 locations I'm in frequently is harder to manage than online radio platform presets.
I especially like radio for video games. Certain games really lend themselves to it. Like Euro Truck Simulator. Driving a lorry around Sweden, making deliveries while listening to local radio, makes for quite an immersive experience.
I think that there is something to be said about professionally curated music. Most terrestrial radio is irrelevant (in the US at least, thanks to ClearChannel) but I've been listening to SomaFM for awhile now and genre for genre I like it better than what any algorithm has put together.
I'd happily listen to a Spotify playlist if i could reliably discover playlists in specific genres that have a good mix of stuff and are regularly updated. Spotify doesn't seem to have an interface for that.
I could be wrong, but I figured South Korea might not do regular radio that much. It has dense population and a big network of mobile data for streaming.
When I first saw the band's name in the early 90s, my imagination ran wild with what they might be like. Considering the musical landscape at the time (a few I was aware of-- Enya, Fishbone, Skinny Puppy, Ice Cube, Slayer) it could have been anything and everything.
They are still one of my favorite bands, and Badmotorfinger is probably in my top 3 albums of all time... but I must admit I was disappointed when I first heard them because my expectations had been so crazy from the name. It took going through some tough times before I warmed up to their style, and the name never seemed to have much to do with it. It's a great name, though.
Edit: I also recall a nice little linux program called radiotray, on debian (that sat in the XFCE or maybe LXDE app tray / bar), that did something similar. Presumably there are others.
Edit2: I mention radiodroid and internet radio among ideas like watching news TV sites on the internet from around the world, on my simple fun/relaxation page: http://lukecall.net/e-9223372036854618463.html
Edit3: I tried libre.fm too (which basically seems to be an FSF initiative to flag or play favorite tracks from archive.org by category, and had high hopes, thought it had promising ideas, but though it seemed to work well at first, I later couldn't get anything to happen after I logged in, etc., and finally gave up. Mentioning in case others know better.