#radio4000

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)

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 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.