Episode: 3938
Title: HPR3938: An open directory of web audio stream
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3938/hpr3938.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 17:38:46

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3938 for Wednesday the 6th of September 2023.
Today's show is entitled, An Open Directory of Web Audio Stream.
It is hosted by DNT, and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is I was looking for an open directory of Web Audio Streams and found radio hyphenbrowser.info.
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I would like to talk for a moment about internet radio, so to speak.
My journey to have less non-free things, let's say, in my life.
I recently unsubscribed to the music streaming platform that I used to use.
And I went back to this old library of MP3 files that I had collected over time that I had.
And it's not very large compared to a lot of other people have.
So I haven't added to this library in many years now, and I originally acquired them through various means.
And I used subsonic to listen to them for a long time.
So I decided I was going to try to do something like that again.
I actually installed Funk Whale, and thank you to those who have recorded Hacker Public Radio episodes before about Funk Whale.
There was one great episode in which you can interview one of the developers, I think.
That was a great episode.
I recommend you check it out if you're interested in this.
Funk Whale is a music streaming platform that you can host yourself, and it can federate.
And then that's cool because there are some instances out there that have free content, creative commons, or otherwise licensed music.
So you can connect to those instances and listen to that from your own instance.
So I set that up on a Raspberry Pi, but it was too heavy for it.
So I have this other small laptop that I can use for that too.
So I will set that up again soon, just for myself, really.
And then maybe try to see if I can organize committing the money I would spend on the streaming service toward maybe buying records from specific musicians and things, or something like that.
I don't know, I'll see.
So then I remember to tune in radio.
Some of you may know tune in radio.
That was a, it is a mobile app that has a directory of streams.
And it's pretty interesting because you could look up streams by the country, and then you could listen to radio stations from way out somewhere.
You've never been never really thought about.
And that can be a kind of an interesting experience.
And also it's a way I could listen to radio stations from back where I come from, which is Rio in Brazil.
To be honest, I kind of feel like to some extent, it's a little bit irrelevant to buy records if you're mostly buying, if you are mostly interested in pretty old music.
When you're, you know, it's kind of like a movie from 30 years ago.
Let's say, does it really make sense to buy a movie that was made 30 years ago?
Should the distributor or the producer really still be making money off of that?
And more importantly, are they still really making money off of that?
You know, there's a reason why these organizations like the recording industry and so on, they mostly focus on today's popular artists when they talk about fighting copyright infringement.
Now, to be sure I wouldn't apply this to things like the criterion collection, because they, you know, they'll often remaster, retrain for older films for real release.
And they often come with unpublished, previously unpublished commentary tracks and things like that.
So that is a new work that's being produced, right?
So then in that case, of course it makes sense for someone to make it and sell it and for people to buy it.
But when you make such a release and then 30 years later, the company is still extracting rents from that.
I honestly, in my opinion, our society shouldn't be providing the infrastructure for them to do that.
That's not good for society. But anyway, moving on.
I downloaded tune in radio and it was an absolutely awful experience because, you know, they want you to pay, they want you to pay to use their app.
And it's very intrusive with lots of ads and things.
And, you know, in general, it's one of those experiences we all know where you download an app because you want to listen to these radio stations that, you know, thousands and thousands of radio stations around the world put on the internet for free.
And then for some reason, there's this gatekeeper now, which is, in this case, tuning radio.
It's become more intrusive, more or whatever this is that we're talking about that we talk about often.
It's become more of that.
So I figured, you know what? There might be a directory, a free directory, a community driven directory of radio stations out there.
So I looked that up for a while and then I found one.
The URL is radio hyphen browser dot info radio hyphen browser dot info. So it's quite good.
It's just what I was looking for and on that on their website, there is a listing of applications that use its API took to access its directory.
And then, so then I went looking through those and let's take a look at that real quick apps.
Okay, so for Android, we had radio droid 2, open radio, transistors, transistor, and so on.
So I tried out open radio. It is available only on the Google Play Store.
And the thing for me is it's kind of a pain that I want to use Android audio.
I mean auto. What I mean by this is that the app has a version of it for Android Auto, which is the software that runs on the center console of many newer cars.
You have the app on your Android phone and then when you connect the phone to the car and you get Android Auto on the car center console screen, that app will appear there in the app menu.
That's what it means for an app to have an Android Auto version so that I can, you know, any any application to do a sound, it will be a plus if it has an Android audio version or whatever.
And that means that it's, it's kind of, it kind of makes the whole thing a little less free because Android audio is a component that is part of the Google apps.
It's not part of the open source Android. So, but, you know, that's that.
So, then yeah, I looked around and I found the open radio and this other one called tune FM are two applications that work with Android audio.
And again, I said Android audio, but it was supposed to be Android Auto.
And then that also means that even if the app is available on FDroid, you have to install it via Google Play Store to get the Android audio part.
I think that's what I read somewhere I didn't test that.
So, open radio is really good, but it's kind of buggy on Android audio.
Actually, very buggy. It's, it makes it pretty hard to use. I don't know exactly what happens, but you go to your favorites and you can try to switch to a different station.
Sometimes it, it gets in some kind of a funk where it won't switch. It will just reload the same station again. It just kind of gets locked in that state.
And there's also something weird that happens with a kind of a playlist functionality in it.
You advance as if you were advancing to a different track and it will just move to other stations and I don't know where it's getting these stations from.
I think they might be the popular list that's in this app. I don't know, but so anyway, I gave up on that.
Then, I'm trying to tune FM. That is, it has a ton of ads.
Now, it's pretty bad. There are ads when you're scrolling through your stations, even when you're scrolling through your favorites.
Like, the app on the phone is really not very good because it has very intrusive ads.
Now, you can't pay to remove the ads and that's probably what I will do.
But the Android audio part works so far it has worked perfectly.
And there are no ads in the Android Auto part.
Now, another app I've tried is Transistor.
Transistor for Android. That one is really good, but it doesn't have Android Auto.
I don't think, but otherwise, the interface is almost perfect.
I think the only thing that's kind of inconvenient about it is when you're trying to search for a radio station, it's just not very rich or something.
There's not such a great interface for doing that. But once you add your stations, it's just great.
I'm finding that that's a really good replacement for these music apps.
As it happens with so many things, we get used to the idea that we should just always be picking the music we're going to listen to and things like that.
And we end up agreeing that that is just better.
Without a very specific logical explanation for why that would be better.
And we don't ponder the ways in which it's worse.
But for a very long time, we didn't really do that very much, and we had to make the decision to buy a disk or a record or something when we really liked something.
Now, it's like everything is basically the same.
And you might kind of like whether you were really captivated by some music or you just heard about it, it's the same thing you have the album right there in your music streaming app, unless you don't, of course, which then if you don't, you're screwed.
I've been doing that and it's been pretty fun listening mostly to three stations from back in Brazil from Rio.
So that's been just great.
And as far as purchasing music so far, I'm finding that it's pretty hard to purchase music.
Music nowadays, a lot of, it seems like a lot of artists don't really, don't really do that or something.
And there's almost no such thing as a record store anymore. There actually is one even close to me, but you know, it's like a antique record shop kind of thing.
They generally won't have new records, right?
So again, you're kind of in a space that's somewhat marginalized by mainstream capitalism, which is great, but it is not exactly what I'm trying to do in this case, right?
What I'm thinking about is how could I enjoy some new music whenever I find some that's good in a way that makes sense and also agrees to some of my terms.
So I'm not sure how that's going to work out, but we'll see.
And then, you know, you can also listen to music on YouTube. I'm thinking about, you know, if I really like some music that I listen to on the radio, which has happened pretty recently, I might just go to YouTube and then use YouTube DL to record the music as if I were listening to it on the radio and recording it to my cassette tape.
That wouldn't be my preference because I understand that to the copyright proponents, there's something fundamentally different about kind of serendipitously recording a song as it's playing on the radio and actually queuing up the same song that you're going to record.
You know, although I would rather have the access to culture be free and add free.
I don't necessarily think that the solution for it is to just use technical means to bypass restrictions that others are trying to put in place.
In my view, the reason that has emerged is as a way for people to overcome an untenable situation that wasn't of their own making.
So another thing that I think is worth noting here is that depending on your selection of radio stations, you may be kind of right back where you started.
Maybe no better than the streaming services, right? In fact, you may be worse off because you may be just listening to things.
You know, the selections are not being made for your cultural enrichment, but for other various reasons.
So in my case, I've been listening mostly to stations that are owned by the government in Brazil.
So there are kind of no ads. There are sometimes sort of ads for local theater productions that are happening in town and things like that.
I guess you could say those are ads in a way, but there aren't ads in the traditional sense.
And the programming is generally designed to convey Brazilian culture, Brazilian music to the listener rather than, you know, create advertising space to sell.
I think that makes a big difference. So if there are such stations, you might be interested in listening to, I would recommend you try it out.
So that's how much time I will take from you. Thank you for listening. I thought maybe a few people would be interested in knowing about this radio browser dot info radio hyphen browser dot info website that this exists in its community driven resource.
And maybe some other people would be interested in trying out all that.
I will put in the show notes the links to three stations that I've been listening to just for fun because you know, I get to do it.
So yeah, maybe if you are, if you'd be interested in checking out some Brazilian music tune into that.
And let me know in the comments if you try any of this out or you know, if you have, if you've had your own thoughts on this type of experience trying out alternatives to to these super commercial streaming web 2.0 things, then please record a show.
This is something that I've been thinking a lot about in many areas of life. And I would be interested in hearing other perspectives and experiences.
So the way you can do that is just like I just did and you record yourself talking about it and then you go to hacker public radio.
You click where it says upload. Pick a date and then just kind of follow the prompts on the on the website.
You will have to go to your email to get the actual link where you upload your audio.
And then you will become a hacker public radio contributor and you know, the magic stars there.
All right, thank you for tuning in. Come back tomorrow for another one. I'll see you later. Bye.
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