Thanks for the post OP. Nice to be back on the HN homepage again.
We launched Radio Garden almost two years ago. Since four months I have shifted from doing RG on the side to giving it my full attention. We are doing millions of monthly visitors from all over the world. Now our mission is to build out the platform in such a way that people can use it as their main destination for radio.
We are currently focusing on putting out some much needed features like search. Next up will be some great curation features to help guide you to stations you care about and also surprise you with hard to find gems.
I would like to ask if there are any updates for radio addresses. Right now Barrow, AK cannot be connected. It was interesting for me to listen the news they have at corner of earth. Thanks and keep up the good work.
This is super cool, and it reminds of the utopian public imagination of the future of the internet in the 90's. When cyberspace was often showcased in the form of actual spaces instead of the flat list like presentations we have ended up with today. The weird 3d intermezzo between console based computing and a future that ended being all about windows, lists and buttons.
It's like when interfaces become map-based, especially on top of an actual 3d globe, something weird happens and some of the skizoid foggy fragmentation of the modern internet falls away and becomes ordered.
There is a scarcely known concept called Psychogeography that has to do with the interaction between humans, places and emotions, and its like globe based presentations of data does something both important and magical that works as an antidote to the disassociation, rootlessness and loss of both history and empathy that cyberspace without geographical anchors has lead us to.
90's comic book pop-esoterica took up the idea of the living-city, an advanced evolution of the Anima or the spirit from tribal religions, where each street, neighbourhood and country had it's own unique mood created from the people-cells of the country-organism. This spirit was an amalgamation of the locally anchored tastes, music, smells, sights and philosophies - unique to each area and that formed a somewhat cohesive aesthetic framework that functioned as a local mythology in which people could form an individual identity or an identity as a neighbourhood or a country.
The internet has somewhat eradicated these local emergent properties because people look into their phones and don't connect with each other locally anymore. Today cyberspace is all encompassing and we don't go to a gadget to get emerged, we exist inside of it at all times and everywhere.
This in turn has lead us to become fuzzy identities that has difficulties navigating without a GPS or other authoritarian maps of meaning while the parts of the brain devoted to navigation shrinks with unknown consequences.
These unknown consequences presents themselves most potently when "something clicks" sporadically and we become aware of the spaceless, fractured fog we have come to exist inside of at all times.
Looking at a globe with some cultural context is one of the mystical potent Sigils or gateways that instantly helps to deprogram and declutter this noisy feeling and becomes a starting point for further non-insane exploration.
Comments like this are why I keep coming back to HN. That living-city concept blows my mind on so many levels. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and diverse perspective!
I was super into grabbing the stream database they are using. (For my own personal wifi radio)
This page has an interesting behavior when used without a session key: http://data.radio.garden/live.json
It returns stations but with fake/warning data.
id "radio-afghanistan"
name "This app is fake"
website "http://rta.org.af/"
src "http://radio.garden/public/fake-app-warning.mp3"
I guess they don't intend on opening any of this up
Very sorry as my intention was not to claim the work.
I completely ignored the posting rule because I did not know.
A friend of mine sent me the link and I found Radio Garden so amazing that I wanted to share it to this community.
I really meant no other intentions except sharing it widely for the greater good. Again apologies to the author
studiopuckey and everyone else who felt offended.
Yeah, I'd say it's cool as long as you're not spamming it. 2 years is a long time and likely out of the memory of most. But, this is just my personal opinion. For example, I've never seen this site and it's pretty cool. Happy it was posted.
It is supposed to be for your own work that you want feedback on. Using the "Show HN" tag for a "normal" submission is a potential hack or cheat to try to get a bit more visibility and increase the odds of getting traction. When used that way, it's deemed a misuse of the tag.
Really impressed with this. It's something I would never have known I wanted until I saw it. I'm happily scrolling around different countries to get a taste of what they are playing.
I only speak English fluently but I've been learning some French and I can see this helping.
This is great, thanks for sharing! There's something slightly related but more focused on music from a specific time period in a country. It's called Radiooooo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428147), just submitted it too because I thought others might find it interesting too.
Super, super cool, and super super clever. Congrats and amazing job!
Small UX feedback: I wish I could pan to another part of the globe and then click on a radio station, rather than it almost immediately switching to whatever station is closest to the middle of my view. (I'd like to keep listening to the old one a bit before choosing the new one.) Also, the + and - buttons seem wonky and sometimes seem to get stuck/inactive.
Best Radio Ever ! Makes me feel that I can immediately connect to the vibe of any nation/community through the music or shows that they like. Not too many features like many here thought you should have had, I think you have hit the right balance where I can choose a radio and continue listening to it without having extra controls over volume or giving the ability to browse while still listening which could unknowingly distract a user from listening the current stream. Thank you for making this.
I keep this on my bookmarks bar and dip in often. It reminds me of when, as a child in the UK, I made a crystal radio from a kit and spent late evenings hunting for intesting stations from continental Europe.
An especially cool feature is that it changes the URL when you select a station (which Google Earth does) into a nice human-readable one with a slug (which Google Maps does not) example (my old college radio station) http://radio.garden/live/westfield-ma/wskb-89-5-fm/
Quick question, (I can’t check the site where I’m at currently), can anyone recommend a service that plays historical radio recordings? For example the radio (with the historical dj/commercials also) from the 1970-90s or older? Preferably not just short snippets, and I’d be open to purchasing recordings if a streaming service isn’t available.
This is awesome, listening to some sweet latin-influenced jazz playing in Mogocha, Russia and remembering how I thought the internet would bring us together some day when I was a kid.
Oh my goodness there are so many! I like to think I grok the scale of the world, and it's easy to trick yourself into thinking it is all pretty uniform. But it really is unfathomable at the human scale of granularity. Awesome project!
As someone who enjoyed listening to AM/MW/LW bands before the internet, this brings back a lot of memories. Back in those days the only way to “connect” to the world was by trying to tune to radio stations as far as away as possible. Not being able to understand the language wasn’t a problem, as long as you could hear something different and understand how different (but similar) we all are.
Sadly, we were recently blocked by the Chinese government on the DNS level. Although we do have many Chinese users on VPN. We don't have so many Chinese stations, because they mostly broadcast using the Windows Media Audio format.
This is one of my favorite internet radio ~stations~ websites. My only beef is that I wish there was a more permanent way to bookmark stations. The current implementation uses cookies or something that doesn't allow me to sync between browsers.
This is definitely on our todo list. Because we have so many users, we want to make sure we do this in a scalable way. We are currently moving from a very static file based lamp stack to a regionally distributed docker swarm based microservices setup.
This is incredible, I'm curious about what you're using for rendering the earth though, is it google maps? If so, how are you able to afford the costs of the api? I love it already, but I'm already worried about its sustainability.
Its a project for some dutch gallery from designer and programer Jonathan Puckey. Big name in design/art scene. I am not connected to the studio but some friends worked there and from my foggy memory the project had excactly those problems. It got big some time ago and although it was supposed to be more local thing they started to get rejected by google analytics and maps. I think instead folding the project the gallery is just swallowing the costs. It goes from Dutch grants - so state money.
Presumably because a lot of radio stations nowadays also stream on the web, this is
just an aggregator with a great way to browse the information.
It's incredibly mind-opening, if I asked you "Do you think Timbuktu has a radio station?", you'd say "For sure.", and we could even google that term to find a website or two, but with them visualized on a globe we could just randomly browse places to listen to what the locals are listening (sadly Timbuktu doesn't seem to be on their map).
thank you for posting this. Interesting how euRope has so many stations. Greece for example has more stations than India on this list
http://www.radio-browser.info/gui/#/countries
Is there a concerted european effort to list stations perhaps because the money for this is dutch? Or does the internet access of a country affect this?
India is actually in the top three countries visiting Radio Garden. We believe internet access and costs do indeed affect how many stations can afford to be online. Another reason is that in certain regions, stations tend to use streaming formats like Windows Media Audio, which is not supported on the web. We have a submission system and actively add all submitted stations. A few hundred a week are added to the database.
I just submitted a local radio station. Since this is in the front page, I guess that you'll be overwhelmed with the number of new submissions, though. :)
Love it! When traveling I often enjoy listening to local radio (assuming I understand at least some of the language) in e.g. taxi/Uber. I find that often it gives you perspective and level of detail impossible to get researching the place on the internet. With the fantastic UI of this app I already feel more connected to a lot of places I’m interested in.
Very Cool. Love the auto geo location feature to zero in a local station. This makes the first impression really awesome! You using some type of ip to location lookup, then doing a db lookup for a local station, then connecting me?
I'm slightly freaked out that it went to within 100 meters of my house while I'm all the way across the country, but it seems like it goes there for my colleagues as well, so I guess that's just a coincidence :)
Seconding the request to be able to "lock" a station while scrolling. Other than that it is perfect - UX and discovery is intuitive, the station listings are comprehensive, and the music sounds great
This is rad. It's an early monday morning and I'm listening to what would be late night wave anime radio in Japan. Really cool idea and solid execution.
In my opinion yes. There's trend on dumbing down media UI on desktop, even though it doesn't have restrictions of mobile, with instagram being prime example - no volume control and no ability to move position. It's their choice for UI not technical problem. I have several sound sources - couple of sites in tabs that don't have volume control, media player, notification sounds, etc. They are all set in balance to my liking and I don't want to fiddle with global volume for every site.
I don't get that (maybe Apple devices make volume management easier than other manufacturers?), but perhaps more importantly, isn't the site just feeding your browser a link to a 3rd-party stream?
In other words, I doubt the site _could_ do anything about the volume.
I find the green dots easy to miss on a green earth.
I find the gray dots even easier to miss.
I wish I could "lock" a stream while I spin the globe, just to be able to browse and see how dense an area is for signals, before committing or stopping what I was listening to.
History didn't do what I expected it to do AT ALL. I wanted to find a stream I had previously, but lost because I couldn't find the dot due to the previously aforementioned issues.
Okay now that I'm in History anyway, why am I stuck in 1987? Can I change the year... with the plus and minus buttons? Nope! Okay I'm done with History now.
We launched Radio Garden almost two years ago. Since four months I have shifted from doing RG on the side to giving it my full attention. We are doing millions of monthly visitors from all over the world. Now our mission is to build out the platform in such a way that people can use it as their main destination for radio.
We are currently focusing on putting out some much needed features like search. Next up will be some great curation features to help guide you to stations you care about and also surprise you with hard to find gems.
Happy to answer any questions!