A few months ago I got sick and tired of The Algorithm shaping my music tastes. "I am a divine being and you are a dumb collection of 1s and 0s, how dare you force yourself upon me?"
Anyway, so I started searching for online radios and found that there are loads. I now have a personal collection of over 200 radio stations. I perhaps listen to around 20 of them on a regular basis.
The rub: radio used to be numbers on a dial. Nowadays each radio station wants you to use their app/website, presumably to make channel hopping harder, to keep you listening to them and only them. Fair enough but I want to switch between them with as little friction as possible.
The good: some radio stations gladly show you their stream url. SomaFM is a good example of this.
The bad: most don't do this.
The solution: chromium's (or chrome's) developer tools. I love firefox but for this step I find chromium is better. Don't worry, you only need to do this once.
How to find a secret radio stream URL:
- Open chromium's developer tools (ctrl-shift-i) and open the Network tab.
- Open the radio website. You'll see lots of activity on the right hand side as the page loads.
- Find the radio player and hit play. (If it opens in a new page, copy that URL and paste it into the window with the developer tools bit open.)
- Look at the "waterfall" bit of the Network tab and find the longest bar. It should keep growing as the audio keeps playing.
- Right click on the name next to the largest waterfall and click Copy > Copy link address.
- To test if you've got the correct stream address, paste it (ctrl-v) straight into a fresh VLC window and hit "Play". If everything works out well, VLC should pick up on the stream and start playing the music.
- Collate all your fave radio station stream URLs and put them into a radio player of choice. On android I use the basic, open source Transistor. On Linux I use pyradio. Yes, it's a terminal-based app. It's better than any graphical based app I've found so far.
- Enjoy listening to quality, HUMAN-PICKED music.
A short selection of some of my fave radios: a.m. ambient (ambient music)
Balamii (UK, mainly electronic)
DKFM (shoegaze/dream pop)
Do!! You!!! World! (Not 24/7 but when it's online it's a great collection of "real music" i.e. older bands and stuff)
Dr Dick's Dub Shack (Dub/Reggae/Dubsteppy stuff)
n10as (Canadian, quite eclectic)
Noods (UK, mainly electronic)
NTS 1 and 2 (UK, LOADS of different genres, from spoken word to noise metal to explorations of old brazilian bossa nova to..)
Radio Gladys Palmera (Spanish/latin american records from a private collection, many of which are simply not available anywhere online)
radio is a foreign country ("world" music)
Radio Relativa (Spain, all sorts)
Radio Seribatu (Indonesian Gamelan music)
SomaFM (Drone Zone, Heavyweight Reggae, others)
The Lot Radio (NYC, all sorts)
Venice Classic Radio (Classical Music with an Italian bias)
Now let me ask you: Do you listen to much online radio or are you fully algorithm-fied? If you have any good online radios please share them here. (bet you I've heard of it :P )