It caches the streams in background so the station changes are instantaneous, no need to wait for buffering. I've been toying with this idea for some time, but never really followed through. It's lovely to see it implemented by someone.
Love the idea! I was in my Uni's radio station and it was such a blast. I made some great friends, had some great times, and learned a ton. Our "chief engineers" were fantastic engineers. The amount I learned from them is incredible.
Radio is interesting because there is a required structure (mandated by the FCC) that is fairly strict, but leaves plenty of room for creativity and freedom. Great way to learn how to work within constraints and get the most out of something.
If any college students are reading this, consider joining your school's radio station. It was a great way to meet people and learn.
Totally! I made this because I used to spend a ton of time at my college radio station, and whenever I would visit other colleges, I made sure to check out their student radio if they had one. The programming is always so unique and offbeat, probably because it's mostly just students DJing for fun.
It's been a blast building this—I've been able to spend a ton of time listening to college radio, and also sharpen my front end skills. Looking for jobs/contracts now if anyone is hiring :)
It has University of Cologne and a bunch of Canadian stations! Are there any other international college stations you'd like to see on it? I've mostly been adding stations from user requests, and most of them have been in the US.
Curious how you chose the default 8 stations? This is obviously super nitpicky but WERS deserves the Boston spot over WHRB IMO. Yeah, Emerson isn't exactly a powerhouse school, but their radio station is a legitimate player in a major radio market in a way that most college radio stations (Harvard's included) aren't. Definitely more important in Boston than WHRB is.
That aside, I'll two stations to your list: my former home station, WRBB, in lovely Boston, Massachusetts, and WMBR across the river in Cambridge.
First four-ish were my favorites when I was building this, and the rest were pretty arbitrary (though I favored streams that were more reliable on more platforms). I actually like WERS better than WHRB; will switch them on the next push :)
WERS is easily my favorite station in the area; and over the past year it's given me The Beths, Lake Street Dive, and Wet Leg. Absolutely worth a listen.
Boston really is a city of riches in terms of college radio, and each one has its own appeal.
WERS has professional-level radio production, solid music that has broad appeal without being "mainstream". Emerson is one of the few schools I know of where some people will go to the school specifically for the radio station. It's why they have such a large, consistent listnership.
WMBR's DJs are fantastic. The station itself definitely has a more college feel but it's still very well-produced and the station itself seems to be really good at playing obscure tunes, especially in the psych/garage/punk/shoegaze realm. There's a distinct sort of sound I expect with them that almost reminds me of WFMU where I grew up, which is high praise.
WHRB tends to favor classical and jazz more than the other schools' stations because they dedicate large blocs of time to those genres
And then there's my WRBB. We sometimes had some gaps in production (depending on who was DJing) but it's still a great listen since there tends to be a wider range of tunes that come through the station. It also helped that many of our DJs were stalwarts of the local DIY music scene, so we gave airtime to a lot of small local artists that might not have a ton of promotion otherwise.
Personally, I'll always have a soft spot for WRBB owing to my time there but really you can't go wrong with any of these.
Not sure WFMU really counts as college radio any more (used to be associated with Upsala college) but it’s free-form, listener-supported radio that is very influential in the NYC area.
Haha just saw Upsala has been gone for a couple decades, but I suppose it's fine as long as there's a college I can associate it with. Added to the app :)
There is no search button. When I select Add (+), I can search, but when I select from the search results, nothing plays - it seems to add it to some list, but any controls to actually make it play are either off screen or... something.
I’d like to be able to just search & play. The background loading of multiple streams is only useful if switching a lot, but on mobile it is a bandwidth-buster.
Sounds like I need to work on the UI for switching stations!
The search results let you add new stations to a queue, but they're not playable until you press "Reload Stations" on the modal—which isn't obvious or intuitive. At the very least I can add some instructions for loading new stations.
I've also explored adding a drag and drop interface, but that's a little trickier than search (technically and design-wise). Will need to think more about it. Thanks for the feedback!
I started with like 10 stations and then added them as people requested them. Got a ton of requests when I posted this on Reddit a while ago. Lmk if there are any stations you'd like to see on here!
My UK university was broadcasting it's Radio station online in 2000, and presumably before, it was a desktop (tower) linux PC taking the studio output and running (IIRC) Icecast off a massive 10M internet connection from the University IT department.
More impressive to me was the FM license, which allowed people to pick up the station within about a mile of the campus.
I think there's still something to be said for the effort which goes into proper radio station - the scheduling, actually turning up to broadcast the (live) programs at a specific time, phone ins, news segments, etc, and the organisational skills to get 50 or so people working together on a single project.
CMFU is the college station for my alma-mater, McMaster University in Hamilton, ON. I'm sure they'd love to be featured, it's the third oldest community station in Canada.
https://cfmu.ca/
I love listening to these stations, you always get such a great variety of music you probably wouldn't hear much of otherwise. It seems no amount of Spotify AI will rival the taste-making discoverability power of a college hipster behind a DJ set :)
Very cool! I listen to WMSE (Wisconsin - Milwaukee School of Engineering - https://www.wmse.org/) and WSUW (UWisconsin Whitewater - https://917theedge.weebly.com/) pretty regularly. It'd be great to see those added, and enjoying finding some new ones with this!
Really great work! It might also be cool to have a config that allows for non-cached streams; that way it would allow for "browsing" any of the available streams, rather than limiting to 10 pre-selected ones. I found that restriction to be a bit non-intuitive.
Yep, getting a bunch of comments about the station selection UI (also I can tell from the engagement stats that not a ton of people are successfully swapping out stations). I'm gonna think about how to make this more intuitive in the coming days. Thanks for the feedback!
I wasn’t sure how to get back to the listen to this station page from the “these are the stations I want the option of listening to page”
Took me a bit to figure out clear all would remove them, tapping green meant selected, grey meant not selected, and “Reload new” was like “save new selection”
Instructions for tapping to select/unselect and “save new selection” instead of “reload new” for button label might help
77 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadRadio is interesting because there is a required structure (mandated by the FCC) that is fairly strict, but leaves plenty of room for creativity and freedom. Great way to learn how to work within constraints and get the most out of something.
If any college students are reading this, consider joining your school's radio station. It was a great way to meet people and learn.
It's been a blast building this—I've been able to spend a ton of time listening to college radio, and also sharpen my front end skills. Looking for jobs/contracts now if anyone is hiring :)
Could you add KAOS?
- RUA - Rádio Universitária do Algarve: https://centova.radio.com.pt/proxy/536?mp=/stream (https://rua.pt/)
- Universidade FM (Vila Real): https://centova.radio.com.pt/proxy/405?mp=/stream (https://www.universidade.fm/)
- UAL - Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa: https://spaudio.servers.pt/8006/stream (https://ualmedia.pt/radio-autonoma/)
- FEUP - Engenharia Rádio: http://193.136.38.145:8080/live?type=.mp3 (www.engenhariaradio.pt)
- RUM - Rádio Universitária do Minho: https://centova.radio.com.pt/proxy/558?mp=/stream (https://www.rum.pt/)
- RUC - Rádio Universidade de Coimbra: https://stream.ruc.pt/high (https://www.ruc.pt/)
Can you add WBGU-FM out of Bowling Green, Ohio?
Curious how you chose the default 8 stations? This is obviously super nitpicky but WERS deserves the Boston spot over WHRB IMO. Yeah, Emerson isn't exactly a powerhouse school, but their radio station is a legitimate player in a major radio market in a way that most college radio stations (Harvard's included) aren't. Definitely more important in Boston than WHRB is.
That aside, I'll two stations to your list: my former home station, WRBB, in lovely Boston, Massachusetts, and WMBR across the river in Cambridge.
WERS has professional-level radio production, solid music that has broad appeal without being "mainstream". Emerson is one of the few schools I know of where some people will go to the school specifically for the radio station. It's why they have such a large, consistent listnership.
WMBR's DJs are fantastic. The station itself definitely has a more college feel but it's still very well-produced and the station itself seems to be really good at playing obscure tunes, especially in the psych/garage/punk/shoegaze realm. There's a distinct sort of sound I expect with them that almost reminds me of WFMU where I grew up, which is high praise.
WHRB tends to favor classical and jazz more than the other schools' stations because they dedicate large blocs of time to those genres
And then there's my WRBB. We sometimes had some gaps in production (depending on who was DJing) but it's still a great listen since there tends to be a wider range of tunes that come through the station. It also helped that many of our DJs were stalwarts of the local DIY music scene, so we gave airtime to a lot of small local artists that might not have a ton of promotion otherwise.
Personally, I'll always have a soft spot for WRBB owing to my time there but really you can't go wrong with any of these.
Anyway, add it or don’t, but give it a listen!
There is no search button. When I select Add (+), I can search, but when I select from the search results, nothing plays - it seems to add it to some list, but any controls to actually make it play are either off screen or... something.
I’d like to be able to just search & play. The background loading of multiple streams is only useful if switching a lot, but on mobile it is a bandwidth-buster.
The search results let you add new stations to a queue, but they're not playable until you press "Reload Stations" on the modal—which isn't obvious or intuitive. At the very least I can add some instructions for loading new stations.
I've also explored adding a drag and drop interface, but that's a little trickier than search (technically and design-wise). Will need to think more about it. Thanks for the feedback!
WUSB https://www.wusb.fm/
WSOU https://www.wsou.net/
WNYU https://wnyu.org/
WKCR https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/
I used to listen to that all the time growing up in Houston. The blues show was excellent.
Broadcasts online and in FM/DAB in the Ayrshire region of Scotland
More impressive to me was the FM license, which allowed people to pick up the station within about a mile of the campus.
I think there's still something to be said for the effort which goes into proper radio station - the scheduling, actually turning up to broadcast the (live) programs at a specific time, phone ins, news segments, etc, and the organisational skills to get 50 or so people working together on a single project.
https://wths.hope.edu/
https://s3.radio.co/scf79220ed/listen
https://tunein.com/radio/WTHS-899-s23126/
I love listening to these stations, you always get such a great variety of music you probably wouldn't hear much of otherwise. It seems no amount of Spotify AI will rival the taste-making discoverability power of a college hipster behind a DJ set :)
Took me a bit to figure out clear all would remove them, tapping green meant selected, grey meant not selected, and “Reload new” was like “save new selection”
Instructions for tapping to select/unselect and “save new selection” instead of “reload new” for button label might help
They just need to be indexed like the American ones. I am pretty sure there are Canadian ones (and from other countries) as well.
Incomplete list of just U.K. ones