I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station (old.reddit.com)
71 points by dredmorbius 2 hours ago
EvanAnderson an hour ago
Did something like this for janky whole-venue music at my wedding reception back in '07. We had a low power FM transmitter connected to a laptop playing the music. We borrowed a bunch of old "boom boxes" with FM radios from friends, tuned them to our "station", and arrayed them throughout the event space. We kept the volume fairly low on each radio so we didn't have to worry about echoes.
pmontra 18 minutes ago
That solves the problem of keeping all the speakers in sync.
I did something similar with IP tech. I put all my MP3s on a SSD connected to a 3 W ARM SoC at home. The software stack is deefuzzer + icecast + a number of different players according to the device I'm using. A web UI to skip to the next song or to search a string and create a playlist with the result. I setup a few channels by genre. I'm listening to my radio right now. The advantage compared to a FM station is that I don't have to care about interference (I would be the bad guy) and I can listen to it wherever I am.
jklinger410 an hour ago
Shilling for an old employer. This is a neat super simple device that takes incoming headphone and converts to FM.
Whole House FM Transmitter (https://wholehousefmtransmitter.com/)
EvanAnderson 32 minutes ago
It's a little pricey for the hobbyist but for "normies" it looks really good. Neat product idea.
kanbankaren 2 hours ago
You don't even need a Raspberry PI.
You can simplify it even further. List of things you need.
1. Smartphone or DAP.
2. Car Bluetooth FM Transmitter (~$20)
3. USB to 12 V car adapter(~$10)
4. Existing FM radio.
You can set this up in 5 minutes. Connect the smartphone/DAP using BT or AUX cable. Select a free FM channel and you are ready to go.
Also, in the photos, the FM antenna is fully extended which is unnecessary as these FM transmitters put out plenty of RF power.
P.S. On AliExpress, you can buy both for < $15 while on Amazon it is around $30.
P.P.S. Just the USB FM transmitter is only $5 on AE. For the cost of a cup of Coffee!
Projectiboga 7 minutes ago
This isn't an item to cheap out on. Find one with aptX HD support and decent reviews if you have any room in your budget. I use the bluetooth to FM all the time. I have a pair, one in my car and another in my travel kit for rental cars. The key is to find one with aptX HD and other newer hi-fi codecs as there are older chips still being sold with lower specs as BT has been a thing for awhile now. I just did a search are there are ones that are usb powered or wall powered. Another better method might be a real FCC certified FM transmitter that are marketed for Drive Ins and "church parking lots" and use a bluetooth receiver or a usb-dac as the input.
qsera an hour ago
Yea, I did this using a raps-pi as well. Rasp-pi is nice in the sense that it can run a web server to select/enqueue/blacklist/ and what not. I can also ssh to it to download songs and automatically add to the playlist...
Along with the ability to blacklist and add new songs, I hope that I will eventually end up with a huge collection of only the best songs (for my taste)
dredmorbius 2 hours ago
For those looking for technical details, Github, "Pi FM Kitchen Radio Station" <https://github.com/trwmato/pi-fm-kitchen-radio>.
NB: Not my project, but it tickles an interest.
sandreas an hour ago
Here in Germany you have to be careful when setting up a homemade radio signal - it might be illegal depending on frequency and transmit power.
I personally prefer a combination of
duckdns.org
Beets
Navidrome
Audiobookshelf
Substreamer / DSub
PaulWoitaschek/Voice / Audiobookshelf
Wireguard
avian an hour ago
> Here in Germany you have to be careful when setting up a homemade radio signal - it might be illegal depending on frequency and transmit power.
In Germany and everywhere else. The difference is how much it's enforced.
Note that this project isn't using that horrible Raspberry Pi GPIO PWM hack that shits all over RF but an off-the-shelf low power car FM transmitter product. I guess if someone knocks on your door you can point your finger to whoever in Germany sold you that.
spogbiper an hour ago
there are similar concerns in the US but you can legally send a signal a couple hundred feet in most cases
tamimio an hour ago
I have something similar, but cleaner setup, an old iPhone connected to a speaker through lightning, and it had FM radio app and also connected to my navidrome server, works very well. If I want local FM radio however, I have an FM receiver that can be plugged into that speaker too.
gosub100 an hour ago
They make low power AM transmitters as well. I bought one for my dad so he could "stream" old music from the Internet to his old tube radios.
josefritzishere 2 hours ago
This is rad.
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago
netsharc 2 hours ago
> Built as part of an attempt at [...] having overseas content on the radio dial
Old radios have the station locations (cities all over the world) as labels for the tuner: https://www.radioheritage.com/story354/
Or: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/european-cities-rad...?
A further (well, different) hack would be to combine this hardware dial with stream URLs e.g. from https://radio.garden/ ...
_whiteCaps_ 2 hours ago
A modern station list is available here: https://short-wave.info/
elzbardico an hour ago
I miss the experience of having career professionals 100% dedicated to the music world curating a list of what I would hear. Of course, it was not perfect, there were ads, most stations played pop slop, but most of the time there was a few stations for your taste, your knew your preferred DJs times and there was a certain sense of community in being a regular fan of a show.
dewey an hour ago
How much of that do you think is rose tinted glasses and nostalgia? On paper that doesn't sound too different than Apple Music Radio for example where there's radio shows with local DJs or hosts that talk, play music and have curated play lists by a human editor.
I'm sure other streaming services have the same and curators can pick from a much larger set of music, from any part of the world. More than they ever could at a radio station where they had to order and ship CDs around.
There's also many independent internet radio stations or music podcasts these days which can be launched for little money, don't require a broadcasting license and can be listened to from any place in the world.
I understand the nostalgia angle, but objectively it seems like what we currently have is better and more open on all counts.
kanbankaren 35 minutes ago
Yep. It is mostly nostalgia as there isn't anything better than an AI curating a million songs based on our like/dislikes, but on a macro level, we are at the mercy of people who tune these algorithms.
Are we being 'nudged' to like certain genres or musicians because they are being promoted? Of course, this could happen with a DJ or traditional FM station too, but with centralized AI, you impart that 'nudging' on literally millions of people.
doublepg23 36 minutes ago
> There's also many independent internet radio stations or music podcasts these days which can be launched for little money, don't require a broadcasting license and can be listened to from any place in the world.
Indeed - radioparadise.com is a quite nice Internet Radio
toast0 24 minutes ago
Eh. I still listen this way. I subscribe to a streaming radio provider in my genre, and there's also a local high school station that plays my genre of music most of the time.
It's much better than what I've experienced with spotify and similar and it's way less effort. I had built a pretty big launchcast preference profile, but it took years of active listening, and in my genre remixes are preferred over original recordings but radio on demand doesn't have them ... you need currated collections, and I'd rather not be the curator.
I do worry about the longevity of the subscription service though... at least some of the channels are very repetitive, it feels like someone set up a currated rotation a while ago that just continues to repeat. They did the sec crowdfunding several years ago and there was a lot of related party transactions that looked too squishy for me, and after the offering expired they did the required years of reporting and its a blackbox again.
teroshan an hour ago
What fills that void for me: https://www.nts.live/
I have a list of "Shows" I follow, with regular updates from star guests (Tim Reaper for jungle music [1] , Lena Raine for video game OST [2], ...)
Their "NTS Guide to..." [3] is really great to peek into a new genre as well.
I highly recommend.
[1] https://www.nts.live/shows/tim-reaper
sockaddr an hour ago
I miss that as well but more than likely (at least in the US) that "curated" channel you use to listen to was probably owned by Clear Channel and probably the same exact content played in every other city where everyone else felt like it was for them as well.
doublepg23 35 minutes ago
I never experienced but I've heard universities used to have the best curated radio stations.