104 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] thread
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.

Same. I must say all pop music seems to sound the same no matter the language.
(comment deleted)
This is going places. It's quite useful.
Looks cool, but I'm not sure what the +/- buttons do, they seem to only move the globe sometimes and zoom in and out other times.

Currently zoomed too far in and can't zoom out.

Zoom buttons just pick random stations in Firefox. In Edge the map doesn't even move. Mobile Safari doesn't work at all.

Devs gotta stop testing their apps only in Chrome. Not everyone wants Google spyware shit on their systems.

I love this! It took me about 10 secs to find something I enjoy listening to.

The UI and ease of access to so many streams is incredible. Great job.

Gimmicky ... but it was really fun to scroll around various countries. Nice job.
(comment deleted)
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.

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.
this is amazing! congratulations on the great work! how does it get the radio feeds from all over the globe?
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).

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.
Thanks for that. This is awesome too. Easy to use.
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.
my kid fantasies of having a short wave radio become true
This is much fun! Kudos for building this!
How long before television.garden?
Previously discussed in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164058

I noticed there that the top comment is "developer here, ..." by user studiopuckey, do you work with them?

What's "Show HN" etiquette here? Is submitting something two years old cool, or is it only supposed to be for new things or posted once?
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.
Reposting the same Show HN with a different user ID is strange though. It's supposed to be personal work
This post might be some sneaky marketing for whatever it is OP is promoting in its profile.

This is the second random Show HN post in three days under this profile.

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.
(We have no relation to OP and were also surprised to see this posted under Show HN)
Well that can't be good. I'm sorry to see your work claimed by someone else. @Dang, is there anything that can be done about this?
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.
Love the idea! Congratulations.
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
That is fantastic. I was looking exactly for a list like that one to build a online radio player on a small headless board. Thankyou!
This is an awesome resource, exactly what I needed.

Thanks for posting it

Good DB, thanks! It sez:'Community-driven effort', 'Any help is appreciated!'

Found and updated a couple of my old 'missing in action' links, and added a couple of good ones they were missing.

My guess would be this was added after another app started hitting their endpoints? Otherwise there would be no point to doing it like this.
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.

+1 for psychogeography. This is a cool comment, do you have any recommendations for books/essays in this vein beyond Guy Dubord?

Edit: an => any typo

wow this is resonating with me. Got anything more to tell about this topic?
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!
Amazing project.

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. :)

(comment deleted)
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?
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.
(comment deleted)
The only thing I know of like that is, alas, extinct. ReelRadio's Top-40 Aircheck stuff. http://reelradio.com/

(I had no luck on Wayback; YMMV) Somewhere out there, someone's sitting on that stuff. I'd be eager to learn more.

(Also out there somewhere is a 48-hour 'History of Rock' radio series that originated 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rock_and_Roll and was updated a couple of times. It WAS online ... I wanna say, a decade ago?)