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Is there an open directory of radio stream URIs? 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.
There is http://dir.xiph.org for Icecast radio stations.
Nice. 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. :-)
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?
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
Legal worries are your own.
Just wondering what would happen if you combined these thousands of radio stations to 1 stream. Would it result to white noise?
Is there an open directory of radio stream URIs? 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.
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?
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.
2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18427701
2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164058
Comments from the developer in both threads.
If you like this to explore music of other places, try also https://radiooooo.com/ to travel through time and space. Mentioned here a few times ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... )
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 his…