
Google Earth for live radios - jaoued
http://radio.garden
======
studiopuckey
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.

Happy to answer any questions!

~~~
zv
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.

~~~
studiopuckey
It works for us: [http://radio.garden/live/barrow-
ak/kbrw/](http://radio.garden/live/barrow-ak/kbrw/)

------
kossTKR
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.

~~~
sizzle
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!

------
gammateam
SUPER COOL

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.

Good job! Looking forward to seeing this evolve

------
robertely
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](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

~~~
dest
Use [http://www.radio-browser.info/gui/#/](http://www.radio-
browser.info/gui/#/) instead

~~~
8bitsrule
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.

------
matthberg
Previously discussed in 2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13164058](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?

~~~
crazygringo
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?

~~~
WestCoastJustin
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.

~~~
dest
Reposting the same Show HN with a different user ID is strange though. It's
supposed to be personal work

~~~
rch
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.

------
jonquark
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.

~~~
iosonofuturista
Same. I must say all pop music seems to sound the same no matter the language.

------
dewey
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428147)),
just submitted it too because I thought others might find it interesting too.

~~~
jaoued
Thanks for that. This is awesome too. Easy to use.

------
crazygringo
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.

------
Cyph0n
This is amazing!

If you’re up for some traditional southern Tunisian music, tune in here:
[http://radio.garden/live/djerba-midun/ulysse-
fm/](http://radio.garden/live/djerba-midun/ulysse-fm/)

------
o2l
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.

------
rikkus
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.

------
EamonnMR
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/](http://radio.garden/live/westfield-ma/wskb-89-5-fm/)

------
sbr464
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.

~~~
sangnoir
[https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio](https://archive.org/details/oldtimeradio)

[https://archive.org/details/radioprograms](https://archive.org/details/radioprograms)

Enjoy!

------
WaxProlix
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.

------
ehnto
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!

------
spaceflunky
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.

------
NKosmatos
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.

------
petecooper
I really like this. I could see this being a great add-in for Volumio[1].

[1] [https://volumio.org](https://volumio.org)

------
mkstowegnv
The elephant that isn't in the room: China (one Hong Kong station and that's
it). Anyone know if their government restricts streaming?

~~~
studiopuckey
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.

------
Jaruzel
To echo everyone else, this is _amazing_.

Currently listening to Black Velvet at
[http://radio.garden/live/saarbrucken/classicrock-
radio/](http://radio.garden/live/saarbrucken/classicrock-radio/)

This is going to help my fledgling German no-end.

------
stevewillows
This is amazing! I discovered Seoul Community Radio -- which is of the ilk as
Berlin Community Radio.

These little stations are total gems. What a fun site!

[1] [http://radio.garden/live/seoul/seoul-communtiy-
radio/](http://radio.garden/live/seoul/seoul-communtiy-radio/)

[1a]
[http://seoulcommunityradio.out.airtime.pro:8000/seoulcommuni...](http://seoulcommunityradio.out.airtime.pro:8000/seoulcommunityradio_a)
(direct)

[2] [http://radio.garden/live/berlin/berlin-community-
radio/](http://radio.garden/live/berlin/berlin-community-radio/)

------
sciencerobot
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.

~~~
studiopuckey
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.

------
jonbaer
How long before television.garden?

------
JCharante
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.

~~~
omnimus
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.

------
phoenix24
this is amazing! congratulations on the great work! how does it get the radio
feeds from all over the globe?

~~~
netsharc
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).

------
voldemort1968
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.

~~~
joecool1029
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.

------
bawana
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](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?

~~~
studiopuckey
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.

------
JD557
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.
:)

------
macintux
I decided to broaden my horizons a bit, see what I could find in Mexico.

The first station was playing "Feel It Still" by Portugal. The Man.

Anyway, awesome application.

------
raviolo
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.

------
CamperBob2
Very nice. I'm surprised you don't bother to equalize the audio levels between
stations, though, any reason for that?

------
Findeton
This is going places. It's quite useful.

------
profalseidol
Best feature of it is that it is fast to load.

Also, being able to listen to WW2 Nazi Propaganda (and a fun commentary about
it):

[http://radio.garden/history/warsaw/ghost-
voices/](http://radio.garden/history/warsaw/ghost-voices/)

------
WestCoastJustin
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?

~~~
icebraining
Not the author, but it seems so; in the credits they link to
[https://github.com/puckey/freegeoip/](https://github.com/puckey/freegeoip/)

------
timvdalen
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 :)

------
WAthrowaway
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

------
SnowingXIV
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.

------
NelsonMinar
Lovely, I'm particularly impressed with how fast the streams started. Biggest
surprise for me was Kiribati and Saint Helena.

------
ralphhughes
Very cool but really, really needs a volume control so that I can set the
radio volume separately to the other tabs I have open.

------
ttsda
It would be nice for it to follow your location on mobile, tuning to the
nearest station as you drive across different towns.

~~~
bch
I honestly don’t know if this is tongue in cheek or not (if it is: bravo!),
but does your car radio not serve that purpose?

------
MH15
Perhaps an option to return to the previously selected station would be
useful? Basically just an undo button...

------
thekhatribharat
Can someone integrate this with Alexa? :)

------
keepsmiling
Groundhog day. ..It has something interesting the combination of geography and
music. Always great

------
intralizee
I love this creation! Thank You, shouldn't you add a login service so
favorites are not lost?

------
pulketo
the same thing but in json... if you want to implement on your projects, as I
probably will...
[http://cdn2.radio.garden/live.json](http://cdn2.radio.garden/live.json)

------
ridgeguy
This is really cool. My friends and I are greatly enjoying it. Thanks!!

------
lucio
No radios in China. Looks like those satellite night of NK photos

------
jfolkins
One of the coolest things I've seen on HN in a long time.

------
xrayzerone
This site makes me happy. A request: dark theme, please.

------
aquadrop
Great idea, but having no volume control is awful.

~~~
macintux
It has the same volume control as pretty much anything else: your operating
system’s.

~~~
wild_preference
Also, hard to take someone seriously when they use the word "awful" to
describe the lack of some minor UI enhancement.

~~~
aquadrop
Well, hard to take someone seriously when they don't understand that it's not
a minor UI enhancement.

~~~
wild_preference
Call it a major UI enhancement. Is it still appropriate use of "awful"?

~~~
aquadrop
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.

------
mxuribe
This is much fun! Kudos for building this!

------
profalseidol
Time to find that radio signal from Vega.

------
JonasJSchreiber
Wow. This is awesome, great submission!

------
pjmlp
Love the idea! Congratulations.

------
quadcore
I love it. It's magical.

------
the_70x
my kid fantasies of having a short wave radio become true

------
monsieurmoru666
thanks for sharing radiooooo.com ! this is AMAZING !

------
madhweep
this is super cool

------
macspoofing
Gimmicky ... but it was really fun to scroll around various countries. Nice
job.

