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Show HN: Campus FM – live stream college and independent radio stations

212 points| erichlee | 3 years ago |campus-fm.com

75 comments

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jjice|3 years ago

Love the idea! I was in my Uni's radio station and it was such a blast. I made some great friends, had some great times, and learned a ton. Our "chief engineers" were fantastic engineers. The amount I learned from them is incredible.

Radio is interesting because there is a required structure (mandated by the FCC) that is fairly strict, but leaves plenty of room for creativity and freedom. Great way to learn how to work within constraints and get the most out of something.

If any college students are reading this, consider joining your school's radio station. It was a great way to meet people and learn.

erichlee|3 years ago

Totally! I made this because I used to spend a ton of time at my college radio station, and whenever I would visit other colleges, I made sure to check out their student radio if they had one. The programming is always so unique and offbeat, probably because it's mostly just students DJing for fun.

It's been a blast building this—I've been able to spend a ton of time listening to college radio, and also sharpen my front end skills. Looking for jobs/contracts now if anyone is hiring :)

rapjr9|3 years ago

It would be nice if the song titles history was listed so it is possible to figure out what song you just listened to. See Soma.fm for an example. Might be difficult if that info is not available digitally (though maybe you could use Shazam or something similar to identify them.)

squarefoot|3 years ago

Works great, however the speed at which it can switch from one radio to another suggest they may be receiving all streams while playing just the selected one. That would translate in a lot more bandwidth used. If that's the case, better check your network usage if you are on mobile or on a metered plan.

joenot443|3 years ago

CMFU is the college station for my alma-mater, McMaster University in Hamilton, ON. I'm sure they'd love to be featured, it's the third oldest community station in Canada. https://cfmu.ca/

I love listening to these stations, you always get such a great variety of music you probably wouldn't hear much of otherwise. It seems no amount of Spotify AI will rival the taste-making discoverability power of a college hipster behind a DJ set :)

erichlee|3 years ago

Added! And totally agreed, one of my favorite things is listening to the little music snob talk sets that the DJs do between songs.

nluken|3 years ago

Love this.

Curious how you chose the default 8 stations? This is obviously super nitpicky but WERS deserves the Boston spot over WHRB IMO. Yeah, Emerson isn't exactly a powerhouse school, but their radio station is a legitimate player in a major radio market in a way that most college radio stations (Harvard's included) aren't. Definitely more important in Boston than WHRB is.

That aside, I'll two stations to your list: my former home station, WRBB, in lovely Boston, Massachusetts, and WMBR across the river in Cambridge.

tapoxi|3 years ago

WERS is easily my favorite station in the area; and over the past year it's given me The Beths, Lake Street Dive, and Wet Leg. Absolutely worth a listen.

erichlee|3 years ago

First four-ish were my favorites when I was building this, and the rest were pretty arbitrary (though I favored streams that were more reliable on more platforms). I actually like WERS better than WHRB; will switch them on the next push :)

foolproofplan|3 years ago

had a show on WRBB back in the day too! what a great experience :)

Cupertino95014|3 years ago

A great idea.

If you're ever in a strange city in a rental car, and want to find a radio station: look between 88 and 92 on the FM dial. That range is reserved for non-profit stations, like these.

You'll also find the local NPR station(s) down there, if there are any.

exitb|3 years ago

It caches the streams in background so the station changes are instantaneous, no need to wait for buffering. I've been toying with this idea for some time, but never really followed through. It's lovely to see it implemented by someone.

turbosepp|3 years ago

Great Project! I think the UI ist really well made for what it aims to do. And I think something to help independent radio is always a great thing.

As some here in the forum I did shows back then on ("independent") stations, love the medium and think there is (too less heard) creativity out there.

..that's also why I built something similar. But with the focus on the shows(!) https://radiobird.fm

Just a german version right now and mostly european stations but with a plan to change that.

1MachineElf|3 years ago

I'm looking for the inverse. I want an AM/FM tuner that I can stream audio from. It used to be I lived in a place without enough internet connectivity for streaming. Even still, AM/FM radio broadcast still worked. *If only there was a radio tuner that I could attach to a raspberry pi, then stream the audio from it. Bonus points if it lets me record live broadcasts.

* A non-janky solution, like something actually designed for audio.

nerdponx|3 years ago

Sorry if I'm missing something, but aren't you asking for literally a radio?

If you want to record, use the 3.5mm "aux" output or RCA outputs and send the audio to a DAW in your computer. Or record to cassette tape like in the old days.

If you want a programmable radio that's otherwise attached to a computer, it seems like this is not hard to DIY with GNU Radio.

alacritas0|3 years ago

You could attach an rtl-sdr to a raspberry pi and locally host a websdr server (https://github.com/jketterl/openwebrx is a good open source one). The rtl-sdr doesn't have a high enough sample rate to cover about half of the commercial fm broadcast spectrum at a time where you can see quickly switch between stations in that portion e.g. 89-94 Mhz. Going to the other half just requires having two different modes and switching between them in the websdr interface.

lelandbatey|3 years ago

It's possible to solder a wire to a GPIO pin of a Raspberry Pi and use a program to broadcast FM from that. I've done this very thing in the past. I did it with a first gen RPi, but I think the actual code to make this work with other RPi models may have changed. Google is your friend for this.

For me the performance was quite good. I could pick up the music anywhere within ~100 ft from a short 6cm wire soldered to a GPIO pin.

rglover|3 years ago

This is awesome. Brings back a lot of memories. Love how fast the streams switch.

Can you add WBGU-FM out of Bowling Green, Ohio?

erichlee|3 years ago

Just added! Their stream is insecure, so it might not load on Chrome desktop. But should be functional on other browsers + on mobile :)

duderific|3 years ago

Really great work! It might also be cool to have a config that allows for non-cached streams; that way it would allow for "browsing" any of the available streams, rather than limiting to 10 pre-selected ones. I found that restriction to be a bit non-intuitive.

erichlee|3 years ago

Yep, getting a bunch of comments about the station selection UI (also I can tell from the engagement stats that not a ton of people are successfully swapping out stations). I'm gonna think about how to make this more intuitive in the coming days. Thanks for the feedback!

benbristow|3 years ago

A UK (Scottish) one - http://uwsradio.co.uk/ - University of the West of Scotland

Broadcasts online and in FM/DAB in the Ayrshire region of Scotland

iso1631|3 years ago

My UK university was broadcasting it's Radio station online in 2000, and presumably before, it was a desktop (tower) linux PC taking the studio output and running (IIRC) Icecast off a massive 10M internet connection from the University IT department.

More impressive to me was the FM license, which allowed people to pick up the station within about a mile of the campus.

I think there's still something to be said for the effort which goes into proper radio station - the scheduling, actually turning up to broadcast the (live) programs at a specific time, phone ins, news segments, etc, and the organisational skills to get 50 or so people working together on a single project.

erichlee|3 years ago

Added! Though it looks like their streaming link caps the # of listeners at a pretty low number, so it might not load every time.

cainxinth|3 years ago

College radio is so much better than commercial radio! Def check out my favorite local college station 88.5 XPN from UPenn. It’s been the best station in my region for as long as I can remember.

creeble|3 years ago

Not sure WFMU really counts as college radio any more (used to be associated with Upsala college) but it’s free-form, listener-supported radio that is very influential in the NYC area.

Anyway, add it or don’t, but give it a listen!

erichlee|3 years ago

Haha just saw Upsala has been gone for a couple decades, but I suppose it's fine as long as there's a college I can associate it with. Added to the app :)

Zigurd|3 years ago

I use Audials for internet radio. Audials has many, if not all, of these stations listed, it has mobile apps, and can cast to Chromecast devices.

nicolaslem|3 years ago

Similarly, there is Shortwave for Gnome users. It pulls its list of stations from www.radio-browser.info.

pg5|3 years ago

This is neat. I'm curious where you got the list of stations. I try to keep a list of them, as most of them accept indie music submissions.

erichlee|3 years ago

I started with like 10 stations and then added them as people requested them. Got a ton of requests when I posted this on Reddit a while ago. Lmk if there are any stations you'd like to see on here!

Mizza|3 years ago

This is awesome, feels super snappy. I miss living in a place with good indie radio, this is hitting the spot.

thomasswift|3 years ago

Cool cool site!

If you are looking for more. - Chicago jazz - College of DuPage, in Glen Ellyn, Il wdcb.org

selimthegrim|3 years ago

WTUL's antenna is still down, so this could be useful for the NOLA area too.

jollyllama|3 years ago

Nice. I like the suggestion form methodology.

kensai|3 years ago

Where are the European university stations?

jhoechtl|3 years ago

There are hardly any

gee_totes|3 years ago

Love it, and love college radio!

Could you add KAOS?

erichlee|3 years ago

Yep, I got you! Just added to the site :)

creeble|3 years ago

A little lost on the interface on iPad.

There is no search button. When I select Add (+), I can search, but when I select from the search results, nothing plays - it seems to add it to some list, but any controls to actually make it play are either off screen or... something.

I’d like to be able to just search & play. The background loading of multiple streams is only useful if switching a lot, but on mobile it is a bandwidth-buster.

erichlee|3 years ago

Sounds like I need to work on the UI for switching stations!

The search results let you add new stations to a queue, but they're not playable until you press "Reload Stations" on the modal—which isn't obvious or intuitive. At the very least I can add some instructions for loading new stations.

I've also explored adding a drag and drop interface, but that's a little trickier than search (technically and design-wise). Will need to think more about it. Thanks for the feedback!

Naac|3 years ago

UCLA Radio - uclaradio.com

rmvt|3 years ago

nit: should've clarified it's US stations only

erichlee|3 years ago

It has University of Cologne and a bunch of Canadian stations! Are there any other international college stations you'd like to see on it? I've mostly been adding stations from user requests, and most of them have been in the US.