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
James Scholes
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk • • •Paweł Masarczyk
in reply to James Scholes • • •Brandon
in reply to James Scholes • • •Paweł Masarczyk
in reply to Brandon • • •Steve Troughton-Smith
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk • • •Peter Vágner
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.
de1.api.radio-browser.info/m3u…
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
de1.api.radio-browser.info/m3u…
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
Paweł Masarczyk
in reply to Peter Vágner • • •Paweł Masarczyk
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