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Some ten years ago Shoutcast used to offer a possibility where by calling up a certain URL with a media player, it would return a playlist of ten randomly selected stations out of the entire catalogue. Launching that and listening to the first thing it would pick was a huge part of my morning routine back then and was especially useful during long commutes to school. My appreciation for music from different genres and corners of the world has expanded beyond imagination and every day I would be wondering what is it gonna be today: A morning show on a station somewhere in Greece, a bit of Liszt and Brahms or perhaps an obscure oldschool hiphop mixtape from the depths of Soundcloud. I was reminded about it last week as I put on a podcast in Hungarian and felt like I was on holiday and listening to a local station, not understanding a word but feeling connected with something local at the place I'm at - a really good feeling. Here's an idea for someone with a bit of time and coding skills to spare: we've got Radio Browser and its directory of over 30.000 stations. It's got an API method for fetching an array of randomly selected stations. Perhaps it would be possible to add this as a feature of an existing Radio Browser supporting app or create a dedicated gateway which, upon calling its URL with a media player would hit the RB API with a request and present a random station or more. Can't wait to get out of the usual bubble of streaming services' recommendations of music and experiencing all of the languages available. @chockenberry @stroughtonsmith @app #Radio #App #OpenSource
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

I like this. Much smaller scale, but I've started pressing the random button on my radio playlist in foobar2000 rather than looking for something specific, or when a song comes on I don't like.
This entry was edited (5 months ago)
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes The person who makes the VoiceVista app offers other apps too. Among those is a radio player called Mapcasts. One feature it has which I haven't seen in others is the ability to autoscan the entire list of station currently present on screen. What you do is you define the frequency at which the app will randomly cycle between the stations and so you can listen to a piece of everything until you hit something you find really interesting. You can narrow the list down by filtering it so that you see only the stations from a specific region or matching given keywords. The problem is, however, that the app only cares about stations as long as they have "FM", "AM" or "TV" written in the tags, as far as I can gather. Also, I suspect the list is a part of the app so it is updated only when a new version comes out in the App Store. Also, it can record streams in the background so you're free to do anything else with the phone while your favourite show is being saved but I found that to be working in a pretty unpredictable way. I really like your approach. Randomness is the way!
in reply to James Scholes

@jscholes I miss browsing. Radiobrowser is getting closer to shoutcast for that. I hope someone makes that.
in reply to Brandon

@serrebi @jscholes OK, looks like we're lucky. Try to load the following into your media player of choice: https://de1.api.radio-browser.info/m3u/stations/search?limit=1&hidebroken=false&order=random&reverse=true Feel free to modify all of the parameters such as the limit of stations loaded or whether the broken ones should be hidden. Theoretically you can load the entire directory onto one Foobar playlist. The only drawback with most iPhone app is that they will not tell you the real station's name or expose the stream URL but the song info text is of course there.
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

there’s a wide range of ‘quality’ from the database, so I don’t think random is the way to go. It probably needs curation, hand pick a few stations per country and then randomize through that. Though that’s a lot of manual work that would take away from other interesting features…
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk

@Paweł Masarczyk I have just tried to open an URL like this in VLC media player and I think it kind of worked.
https://de1.api.radio-browser.info/m3u/stations/search?order=random&limit=10

The thing is the requests are cached server side so we need to wait some 10 minutes in order to get it randomized again. If we all would start doing it we would be retrieving the same list from their cache.

We can spice it up by randomizing the offset for example
https://de1.api.radio-browser.info/m3u/stations/search?order=random&limit=10&offset=1230

With this knowledge you can build your desktop shortcut to your favorite media player such as:
vlc "https://de1.api.radio-browser.info/m3u/stations/search?order=random&limit=10&offset=%RANDOM%"

CC @Craig Hockenberry @TweeseCake @Steve Troughton-Smith #Radio #Streaming

in reply to Peter Vágner

@pvagner We're trying to open it in VLC with a friend and it doesn't want to work somehow, although her browser downloads the prepared m3u just fine. I tried it time after time in a row with Foobar, VRadio and Broadcasts on iOS and it picked a different one each time.
in reply to Peter Vágner

@pvagner OK, never mind, we changed https to http and it swallowed it. We have a nice Mexican station now.