General Notes:

Everything's still experimental but evolving whenever I need to procrastinate doing actual work. Let me know if something's not working. And hopefully other people will build applications that use the api, and help build the database.

If you find a station is down or needs updating, please go to the database page and flag it.

And just for goofs, you can access this site through a bunch of domain names, all pointing the same place: damngoodradio.com, fuckcommercialradio.org, or goodradio.org.

Notes on the Jukebox:

Currently the jukebox is pretty simple, just click a station to play. I need to add a bunch of features, like a "now playing" bar across the top that shows details about the currently playing station, and a way to change the number of stations listed on a page, etc., but for now this'll do. One thing that really bugs me about the current incarnation is that it looks like crap in 1024x768 screen resolution, but alas.

One thing that might not be obvious: you can play a station by typing the name into that first jukebox field. And if you click that field it'll play a random station.

Notes on the Map:

Most of the stations are plotted using the actual GPS coordinates of their transmitters as listed in the dreaded FCC database, so if you zoom way in you often see their antennas. Originally I only listed stations that existed on a radio dial somewhere, but I figured its silly to exclude so much good music, and besides that would be penalizing online broadcasters for offering an alternative to corporate media. So now the map has anything that's good, and you can suggest more if you know of something that's glaringly missing. Be patient with the internet-only stations, I only recently started adding them as of September 2008. One important note: if it's a music station, it must be broadcasting in streaming MP3 and have a reasonably high bitrate stream.

Everything's still experimental but evolving whenever I use this to procrastinate doing actual work. Some coolio features:

  • As I said, most of the stations are plotted using actual GPS coordinates of the transmitter tower as listed in the FCC database (via radio-locator.com). When looking at a station's popup, click the "zoom in" icon to zoom in really close and you can often see the transmitter antenna... Check out CJUM up in Canada for example. I still haven't figured out where to plot the internet-only streams that don't give any indication where they're from. The North Pole maybe? Or does anyone know of a good way to resolve an IP address to an exact physical address?
  • Click a station's icon to get a popup with more info including station phone number, homepage, schedule, currently playing song, webcam if available, IM if available, direct link to shoutcast stream, coverage map if available, etc. Or right click the tower icon (not the text label) to start the stream without opening the popup.
  • You can zoom in/out using the mouse wheel, by double left/single right clicking the map, using the +/- keys on your keyboard, or map controller on the left.
  • If a stream is down or there's some problem with a station, click the "flag" icon in its popup window. Every night my robot tests all the stations and generates a report, so hopefully things stay reasonably up to date.
  • You can suggest a new radio station here.
  • Click the dice for a random station.
  • I only just started adding the internet streams and NPR-ish streams so be patient with those.
  • You can show/hide stations of various categories (college, community, pirate, etc) using the checkboxes in the box to the right of the map.
  • Click the "turn declutter on/off" to hide some stations to reduce clutter. So far this only applies to the college stations since (hallelujia) there's so damn many of them.
  • Looks great on a giganto widescreen monitor when you put your browser into fullscreen mode, especially if you're using something like the Fullerscreen Firefox extension or better yet, Opera.
  • If you're using iTunes you might consider using the "compact mode", which'll prevent iTunes from jumping to the foreground every time you click a station.
  • If you're using Firefox and are annoyed by the "download" window that pops up, just leave it minimized. Or you can disable it in Firefox preferences.
  • After clicking a station you should see a "now playing" link on the sidebar. Clicking the call letters will zoom in on the station on the map.
  • Click the icon in the center of the Google Maps pan/zoom thingus on the left to reset map position. And click anywhere on the map to close the station popup windows.

Need to contact me?