Radio4000 blog

Hello!

Today a new feature appears on the site, tracks search.

On top of now being able to search any radio tracks, and find the one you want to play, you can from today listen to a selection of tracks from a radio.

Fig 1. playing selection “#after“ from Radio Tobha

That’s right, you can try it now, go to any radio (of course, yours too!), and explore the list of tracks. Just search for something, and if there are any results press the “load selection“ button to listen to everything in the player.

About #hashtags 

Hashtags are pretty neat, they can be used to create “playlists“ from your tracks.

Let’s say, that if on every “jazz“ track in you radio, you add to the description the term “#jazz“; you and every other user will then be able to search for all tracks that you decided to tag. Therefore, hashtags can be used as tags, if you feel like it.

Track description, and title

Every track you add to you radio can have a “title“ and “description“. These two fields are used to lookup for your search. You can add every information you think is usefull to a description.

Fig 2. Radio Girafe use of track descriptions allows to play a selection of tracks from “1978“

The future

We this is a major feature and a pretty usefull one. It is also only the beginning as some new ideas will soon come to complement this feature.

If you start using #hashtags in your tracks, let’s say “#cumbia“, or “#party“, you can also “advertise“ your tags in your radio channel description. That way, listeners looking for a radio with “cumbia” will be able to find you, and listen directly to your cumbia selection; a good match.

Last teaser, wouldn’t it be sweet if your tracks could easily have tags already? Let’s say, the country of origin, the track released year, the record label that published it... genre? styles? Many possibilities in this forseable future.

As usual, let us know if you’re having any feedback, issue or want to get in touch:

https://radio4000.com/feedback

Hope you’ll enjoy the digging.

You enjoy discovering and sharing music on Radio4000, but you would like the experience to be done without the mouse, keyboard only?

We just implemented new Keyboard shortcuts to improve your time on the site. find the full up-to-date list on in the support center.

There is a new way to discover Radio4000 channels online, a map of the world.

As of today everyone can position their Radio4000 channel to one location in the world. So can you!

There are no restriction, nor any obligation. As always freedom first. You only decide if and where you would like your channel to appear on the map; where your body resides or your heart belongs, it is and will remain your choice.

If you decide to locate your radio on the world map, you can of course remove or change your position at any time, and this information will appear on your Radio4000 channel page, under your channel title.

This map could not exist without the help of OpenTopoMap and of course OpenStreetMap and their contributors, who both provide the data, expertise and geomatics skills for such projects to exists. We will be forever grateful that you’re making such projects available, thank you.

We chose this particular map tiles for many reasons, to name a few:

Language localisation, so for every region of the world, every places will be represented with the local written system. Zoom in Europe, Russia,  Est-Asia, you’ll quickly see.

This is a topographic map, using contour lines to show elevations, valleys and hills, steepness or gentleness of slopes.

Gorgeous colors and contrasts.

Overall this map is aimed to help all of us discover more music and maybe appreciate in a geographical context choices made by the individuals whose personalities make curating a Radio so special.

We hope you will like it as much as we do.

Discover the map now!

Cheers.

Notes and further readings:

Map projections lead to bias. Watch this YouTube clip, excerpt of “The West Wing” (Season 2 Episode 16) on the Gall–Peters projection (English).

Social and Political Dimensions of the OpenStreetMap Project: Towards a Critical Geographical Research Agenda, Georg Glasze and Chris Perkins (English).

Cartographic Revolution, Le Dessous des Cartes (French, German — English subtitles on YouTube)

From today you can embed your Radio4000 onto any other webpage. Meet RADIO ARKOV.

How to use?

You need to add to your site the following snippet of code. You will find the right code to be copied at the bottom of every Radio4000 radio page.

You can customize the values in pixels of `width` and `height` of this `iframe` HTML element to suit your design needs. If you look closer, you will see the part in the `src` property, ending with `?slug=arkov`. Replace `arkov` for your radio slug and it will work too! Not something to remember, just fun to know.

Features

This player is exactly the same as the one used on radio4000.com. We introduced it earlier this year (blog post). Everything you do on Radio4000 you can also do this this player, on every website you encounter it.

The player is responsive, that means it will fully resize itself depending on your screen size (try it!). Actually, not only does it resize with the scren, but with the parent HTML elements it is within.

If you are looking for a more customizable version of this player, the code is free software (GPLv3)

What is HTML code?

If you are not certain what html is and how it works, we would warmly recommand you have a look at Codecademy's tutorial on HTML and CSS. It is a great ressource to quickly start enjoying writting useful pieces of code.

Hello there,

just wanted to share with you two good tips to start listening to a radio as fast as possible. Let’s take a radio, could be yours, could be anyone else’s, let’s say balls, radio4000.com/balls, hi balls! When you want to play this radio on radio4000.com, you will probably type the address of radio4000 in your web browser, then visit the radio page before finally hitting the play button or a track on the chosen radio.

That’s cool and pretty quick, but now there is a faster way, taking the form of a URL shortcut. Let me show you, it is very straight forward.

radio4000.com/balls/play radio4000.com/balls/play/random 

The first link will just play the latest track from “balls” radio. The second link will play a random track from the same radio.

Note 1: remember it works for any radio, but you of course have to know the radio URL (radio4000.com/balls, the part after the “/”). 

Yes, Radio4000 now officially has an API!

api: https://api.radio4000.com documentation & code: https://github.com/internet4000/radio4000-api

This means you can now use the public data from Radio4000.com (such as the radio channels and their tracks) to create any softwares, hardwares, websites or applications.

What is an API? An API (application programming interface) can take many aspects and is a term generally used in software development. In the current case we could summarize it as a set of tools and specifications defined (here by the Radio4000 team) to help developers apprehend and use data made available through the API.

Using this api as a weekend project, we’ve put together a light DJ setup, with which you can mix two Radio4000 together, making transitions between tracks from each radios. It is of course using the data from the new API, and also the new player.

Good evening!

Tonight Radio4000 gets updated to a new major version (github#v.5.0.0). We’re happy to introduce some new features, and an effort to harmonize the overall experience across the software.

It is coming in with a new radio channel homepage and a new design now including the latest 10 tracks. A new subpage therefore appears under your radio, /tracks. This choice aims to help improve loading performances, and usability such as easing the experience of adding a new track to one’s radio. We also hope in close future to add insights on these amazing lists to help you understand what it contains, how to dig it, and how it can be organized.

Managing your favorite radio channels also becomes more fluid, giving the opportunity to interact in a more organic way while discovering and exploring other people’s selection.

We’re supper excited about the times ahead, improvements are coming strong.

Your feedback is always very much appreciated, so don’t hesitate writing us a line or two, anything on your mind.

Try it out!

Radio4000 has now a new player. It has been deployed to all users since some days and will also allow anyone to embed and customize a player (or many) with any radio on their site.

There is a new design for radio4000, as well as a new logo, and some new features:

upgraded @usernames radio4000.com/your-username

login with an email (use Email, Google, Facebook)

link your Radio4000 to your Email, Google and Facebook, use any of the three (or the three) to login to your account

filter radio channels be better serendipity; order them by last updated, age, or alphabetic order

simplified navigation through the app and radio directory

send us a feedback or ask for help faster

control Radio4000 on your Android device when your screen is locked (works with Firefox browser)

A new update is out on Radio4000 — it’s now faster to add a track to your radio. Whereas before you’d have to go to your radio and first then tap add track, now you can add directly from anywhere on Radio4000.

Radio4000 updates to version 3.3! What’s new?

In order to explore radios faster, we’ve added a “play ‘n shuffle” button on the radio channel cards. Try it, tap it as many times as you like, we think it makes listening much more fun.

Your favorite radios are taking the place of the “most popular radios” section directly on the homepage.

We’ve also started implementing a new design for radios, further innovations can be expected in the upcoming versions.

HTTPS protocol comes in to improve security of communications between your devices and Radio4000 (Note: we recommend you to use this browser extension, https everywhere, that forces https on every site you visit).

Finally, one small but useful change; to share the current track being played, copy its link from the player bar at the bottom.

We’re already working on the next version for Radio4000, you can expect non-intrusive notifications to let you know when radios you like have added new tracks.

One last keyword, customization.

How to use the Radio4000 bookmarklet to add tracks faster in my radio?

Here is a solution that works for every one, on mac, pc, mobile, tablet or smartwatch (alright, possibly not that one), without having to install anything!

Much simpler to explain it with gifs (above), but here is the text explanation:

drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s favorite bar

open a music you like on Youtube. Click the bookmarklet (you just added it in your browser’s favorite bar!)

now that you have been redirected to your Radio on Radio4000, just click Add Track to add this music to your radio. Done!

From now on, just repeat step 3 each time you want to add a music to your Radio4000.

Time flies and so does our new copy on the website. It should be clearer what everything is now. Following along that, you will see that channel descriptions are now everywhere, on a channel detail or on its card — tell there what your channel is about.

We also streamlined the header and player design while preparing for the Ember 2.0 update which should make everything leaner.

Oh, and we added a cheesy loading screen in fifty shades of languages.

Last, here’s a track for you to enjoy http://radio4000.com/good-time-radio/-JqJ9SmQmO_DQx0bmv0k

Today version 3.1.1 of Radio4000 is out!

When have included a bunch of new features, here is a small list:

URL have changed! Find your channel directly at radio.com/yourRadio instead of radio4000.com/c/yourRadio. Easier to remember, more logic but remember to update the links pointing to your radio. 

There is now a big Play button on every radio to listen to it straight when you open it.

You can now see when a radio was last updated. So each time a music is added to a radio it refreshes its “last updated” date.

On the discover page “All Radios” now have the card styles, that means more space for images instead of list as a default display.

The Bookmarklet has been improved so now it does not close the youtube video you were currently listening to

… also some other small bug fixes, clearer text and contextual informations to ease your use of r4!

Hi — today we’ve been upgrading Radio4000 and it’s live!

More images

a bookmarklet to easily add tracks directly while you’re browsing YouTube.

filtering and search is back on Discover

everything is faster with the new Glimmer rendering engine from Ember.

All in all the best Radio4000 so far! As usual, if you need help, have feedback or any other inquiries just use the way to contact us you prefer, please!

How to use the bookmarklet?

It might seem complex if you never used bookmarklets before, but trust us it is really easy!

go to radio4000 and login your account

click on add track

drag and drop the bookmarklet to your bookmark bar (it works everywhere, on every Web Browser, on Windows, on Mac, on Linux, on…) 

navigate to a youtube video you want to add to your radio (try this album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvAJTVRck5E)

now click on your bookmarklet (in your bookmark bar)

should should be redirected to your radio on radio4000 with already the URL and the Title of the youtube video pre-filled

save

What is new?

support heavier images and .gif

mobile design of the playback

performances

no more new radio prompt when you already had one

An internal timeline of things we pushed on Radio4000. Posted here so it doesn’t get lost in the internet.