14 ms·

SomaFM

679 points by Datenstrom 4y ago

Datenstrom 4y ago
Found this thanks to HN and have been really enjoying it for work and study music over the last month. It's hard to keep a good playlist that doesn't get stale, anyone have other stations? I also use Music for Programming[1] and various lofi playlists often. [1]: https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/ https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/
nittanymount 4y ago
this is great! has been listening for a while when need a nice background music at work
5- 4y ago
see also: https://poolsuite.net https://poolsuite.net
rektide 4y ago
I really miss Shoutcast/Icecast being such an active part of my life. The quality is way down, and there's like 1/6th the channels there used to be. For electronica in particular, there was just so much. But there were also so many random niche stations! SomaFM continues to be a great place for highly genre-d music. I make sure to give em money semi-regularly. Suburbs of Goa[1] is one of my favorite. [1] https://somafm.com/suburbsofgoa/ https://somafm.com/suburbsofgoa/
- soylentcola 4y ago
  There are still quite a few though. I have several bookmarks on my normal PC and in AIMP on mobile. I never did "outgrow" my practice of using multiple bookmarked streaming stations as my daily "radio dial".
- bambataa 4y ago
  There may not be as much Icecast stuff but internet radio is doing very well. Someone else has already mentioned nts.live (it has a huge range of stuff, more like a radio station) but other UK-based stations are balamii.com, supremefm.com and rinse.fm (Rinse used to be a pirate radio station but went legal). Internet radio stations are the go to for up to date music really.
- foresto 4y ago
  > For electronica in particular, there was just so much. But there were also so many random niche stations! Indeed. I remember regularly switching between Massinova and a rebroadcast Polish classical station whose DJ had a nice voice.
- meanmrmustard92 4y ago
  Shpongle and OTT are amazing goa-ish electronica. OTT's new album is great.
threeio 4y ago
Good to know SomaFM is still round, its been 20+ years at this point.
kacy 4y ago
I've probably been streaming SomaFM off and on for the last 15-20 years. Thanks for the reminder to donate!
codetrotter 4y ago
I think I used to listen to SomaFM, or something with a similar name. If so then that’s one of the radio streams I found via the xiph Icecast directory. https://dir.xiph.org/ https://dir.xiph.org/ You can listen to these Icecast stations using for example VLC media player, or mpv, or you can also play them directly in most web browsers.
ilkka_es 4y ago
I discovered SomaFM channels (SomaFM, Secret agent, GrooveSalad) from iTunes Radio around 2003. Listened to it always while working on my computer while studying in university. Good memories and so happy they are still around!
- tarentel 4y ago
  Same here. I didn't realize it was still around and not only that the links still open in the apple music desktop app and you can save them in a playlist. Unfortunately doesn't look like they carry over to the phone app but they have a paid app.
guerrilla 4y ago
Really impressive that they've stayed online nearly 20 years. I used to listen to this and MonkeyRadio all the time. They've added a lot of new channels though.
- a-dub 4y ago
  hah! was just wondering what happened to monkeyradio... iirc it was one of the winamp developers who did the selecting...
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    It died but the playlists are on Spotify and elsewhere.
- threeme3 4y ago
  Me too.. monkey radio was really great! https://web.archive.org/web/20040622004325/http://www.monkeyradio.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040622004325/http://www.monkey...
electrotype 4y ago
SomaFM is one of the sites I like to donate to when I can. I also use their Amazon affiliate link as an Amazon bookmark. Drone Zone has been my main background music when working for a couple of years now!
jordanpg 4y ago
First music I ever "streamed" and still excellent. Thank you, Rusty!
skor 4y ago
big thank you to somafm!! sidetracking a little here but a good one for idm is https://verdure.net/ https://verdure.net/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gorekee 4y ago
  The page isn't working for me. I get a error in the console and on url https://verdure.net:8443/radio/192/ https://verdure.net:8443/radio/192/ is going nowhere.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dobin 4y ago
Listening to this since musciforhackers.com went down. Donated a bitcoin back when they were still cheap. Rusty also DJ's at Defcon.
_jal 4y ago
Definitely one of the gems of what we now call the indie-web. I envy Rusty his attention span.
lushdog 4y ago
https://psychedelicized.com/ https://psychedelicized.com/ Has some nice unknown 60-70s psychedelic tracks. Let are lots unknown good but also very bad stuff from this time. Fun to listen to while working.
spiffydave 4y ago
Love it! Been a fan for many years. Would still love to find the archive of music/sounds from musicforhackers.com from years ago. That was an epic channel.
- siegelzero 4y ago
  Did you mean this site? It has some pretty great content. https://musicforprogramming.net/one https://musicforprogramming.net/one
  - spiffydave 4y ago
    That is cool! But no, Music for Hackers was a great combo of ambient/underground music overlaid with old movie audio samples and other stuff. Played from maybe 2000-2008 or something? Can't remember when it died. https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforhackers.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforha...
    - matthewn 4y ago
      I have very fond memories of Music for Hackers ("soundscapes for compromising a remote host"). Have never found anything that fills that particular niche the same way.
- piebob 4y ago
  you might like the DEFCON channel on somafm
zeruch 4y ago
The fact that they are still around is a testament to "Web 1.0" always having been worthwhile...
linsomniac 4y ago
I had somehow forgotten about SomaFM, used to listen to it all the time but haven't in over a decade. I think I thought it had been shut down, I'm probably thinking of LastFM.
spiffydave 4y ago
This page from the Wayback Machine brings back so many memories from MusicforHackers.com: https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforhackers.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforha...
dijit 4y ago
SomaFM was what I used to listen to on backtrack Linux back in the day, as it was one of the sites bookmarked in firefox. wierdly enough I literally remembered about them 2 hours ago and put on defcon radio. Weird to see it pop up again now after i had forgot about it for so long.
Lapsa 4y ago
soma is awesome indeed. long time listener
W-Stool 4y ago
I've been donating to SomaFM for many years, and it is my music provider of choice in my home office (Space Station Soma for me). Some years ago I had an afternoon to kill while visiting San Francisco and Rusty was kind enough to let me stop by and say hello. A quick 10 minute visit turned into one of the most interesting two hours I've spent in my entire life. Rusty gave me the whole tour of the software interface that runs SomaFM and we had a fascinating discussion about the history of SomaFM in particular and streaming music in general. Thanks again Rusty!
- netsharc 4y ago
  Did you meet Big Url too?
  - W-Stool 4y ago
    I always thought it was "Big Earl". You're right!
  - gigama 4y ago
    Well, I've known Url since he was just a little Perl script. <g>
- rosseloh 4y ago
  It's been several years but I also had the pleasure of meeting Rusty down at the studio once. My dad has now made it a habit; he's been to SF for work and pleasure four or five times now, and met up with him each time, I believe. I have been listening to Soma for at least 15 years. Definitely a great place to have bookmarked.
  - baobob 4y ago
    I've been listening since 2004. Every 4 or 5 years I'll realize how much it's been a part of my life through thick and thin, and write him a gushing email. He always has the grace to reply. Would absolutely love to meet him some day
- meerita 4y ago
xenon2 4y ago
internetvin 4y ago
If you’re into unique well curated collections of music across wide ranges of genres, I highly recommend checking out NTS Radio, it’s also listener supported: https://nts.live https://nts.live
itsoktocry 4y ago
So awesome to see this here. Been listening to, donating to and recommending SomaFM since for 15 years.
pixel_tracing 4y ago
Can I run this from terminal, and fantastic for producing this
- dataqat 4y ago
  Just saw this Mac CLI player referenced on Reddit https://github.com/rockymadden/somafm-cli https://github.com/rockymadden/somafm-cli
tbatchelli 4y ago
SomeFM is such a rarity these days, a reminder of how we believed the Internet was going to be. They take recurring donations. Probably the best way to help them and one of the best investments for me, as keeping it up and running is a way to keep these naive ideas alive. The music is curated and is most excellent (for my taste, of course). I have Groove Salad on speed dial in my HomePods around the house (through TuneIn radio). Thank you Rusty for sticking with it!
- paulcole 4y ago
  > SomeFM is such a rarity these days, a reminder of how we believed the Internet was going to be. Let me start out by saying that SomaFM is great. But when I started listening to SomaFM (nearly 20 years ago), I never imagined that for only $10/month I'd be able to listen to (essentially) any song whenever I wanted. That's amazing and so much more valuable (to me) than what Soma offers.
  - huron 4y ago
    But how do you find new songs for you to put on your playlists? That’s why SomaFM and online stations like KCRW are so valuable. They’re ways to introduce new music and even new styles of music to the listeners.
    - kleiba 4y ago
      Isn't that what recommender systems are for? /scnr
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        They can only recommend what they understand. I am not aware of any automated recommender that listens to music to make decisions on how to recommend it. For that, humans are still good.
        kleiba 4y ago
wrycoder 4y ago
My favorite SomaFM channel is Doomed. But, they now run it only around the time of Halloween. I would categorize it as Halloween Dark Industrial Ambient. They had a new channel, The Dark Zone, which ran for awhile as a Special. It was OK, but Doomed is unique.
- spookybones 4y ago
  Yes, I loved both! Hope they bring back one of them year round.
kofejnik 4y ago
Wow, no mention of chromanova.de yet?
unova 4y ago
Thanks for this! This made my day/week/month :D
seydor 4y ago
I don't understand why internet radio has died. Sure, spotify etc but broadcast music is different. Radio didn't die because CDs existed
- kdmccormick 4y ago
  did $10/mo give you access to almost every CD ever released, playable anywhere?
  - myself248 4y ago
    I've recently gone back to buying CDs. I got annoyed with stuff "going gray" in my Spotify playlists, just vanishing out of the blue after I'd fallen in love with it and wanted it to be part of my mood and given that mood a name and curated a whole menagerie to go with it. Soma's no answer to that, so this is way off-topic. But streaming services are no replacement for the CD. I'll rip and encode and curate on my own devices, especially now that it's trivial to pop a 128GB microSD card into my phone.
    - kdmccormick 4y ago
      I'm with you. But you can imagine that for the average listener, especially those with limited free time and disposable income, tracks going gray is rare enough that it doesn't warrant switching back to buying CDs.
  - seydor 4y ago
    it's enough to buy 1 album per month. of course it s not the same, but i don't like to listen to every cd ever. The rare times i really wanted to hear something i could pirate it. I still enjoy radio streams for the low mental overhead though, plus u get the news too
    - kdmccormick 4y ago
      Yeah, I totally agree. I'm just responding to the comment: > I don't understand why internet radio has died. Sure, spotify etc but broadcast music is different. Radio didn't die because CDs existed My point is that CDs and subscription streaming are two totally different beasts, and it's not surprising that the latter was more of a disruptor to FM/internet radio.
jacamera 4y ago
A lot has changed over the past 20 years but playing http://somafm.com/groovesalad.pls http://somafm.com/groovesalad.pls on Winamp remains the same. I started donating $5/mo a few years ago because I appreciate having such a valuable constant in my life more and more as time goes on.
drorwolmer 4y ago
I created https://wfh.dj https://wfh.dj so I can listen to new music from my subscriptions (>20m) without the youtube procrastination rabbit hole. Mostly House, Electronic, Jazz (Stuff me and the team like to listen to while we work).
- nop_slide 4y ago
  This is rad. I've been getting to House since I started working from home (no pun intended). Check out mood:indigo, might make a good additions to your playlists! https://soundcloud.com/moodindigo72 https://soundcloud.com/moodindigo72
tootie 4y ago
Neat. I do this with public radio (KCRW, WQXR, WFMU) but this opens up a lot of variety.
- joemi 4y ago
  WFMU is truly amazing. I've been listening to them for decades, have several friends who have done shows there and/or volunteered, and I even performed live on air there once many years ago. But what's truly amazing is their show archives and playlists, almost all the shows are recorded and streamable, going back many many years. There are a bunch of radio stations that get this right currently, but WFMU is one of the only ones (or maybe THE only one?) that's been getting it right for soooooo long.
- quantumfissure 4y ago
  Consider adding WXPN to your repertoire. They're out of the University of Pennsylvania in Philly. Incredible selection of music and commercial free. https://xpn.org/ https://xpn.org/
binwiederhier 4y ago
I re-discovered SomaFM the other day. I was listening to that maybe 15 years ago. I couldn't believe it was still online. Great music.
Claude_Shannon 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this website, it's really great! :)
arprocter 4y ago
This and Digitally Imported has gotten me through a lot
- alex_suzuki 4y ago
  DI.FM! Thanks for that litte trip down memory lane. Will tune in tonight if it‘s still online.
  - axefrog 4y ago
    Di.fm has a modern UI and going as strong as ever.
- dleslie 4y ago
  I've been a di.fm subscriber for longer than I care to recall. Great service.
vlod 4y ago
Thanks for the reminder to donate. I've been getting into DEFCON radio. I like all the 'quirky' clips. Even tempted to go to the conference this year.
- helios_invictus 4y ago
  You mean these clips?! http://nerdshow.com/def-con-somafm-clips-with-quotes/ http://nerdshow.com/def-con-somafm-clips-with-quotes/
  - vlod 4y ago
    Yep. thanks!
eatwater123 4y ago
My favourite. Please remember to donate if you can! A little slice of internet & music heaven.
amerine 4y ago
Groove Salad For Lyfe
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Groove Salad, or Groove Salad Classic?
  - vlowther 4y ago
    Yes.
pdxpatzer 4y ago
thank you for the reminder to donate ! I listen to soma.fm all the time
justinzollars 4y ago
I used to listen to SomaFM in 2005 while I was in Grad School! It was awesome!
indigodaddy 4y ago
Radio Paradise [1] is also going strong after 20+ years. Fantastic curation and you can even stream in lossless for free (or at least I seem to be able to from the Android TV app). [1] https://radioparadise.com/ https://radioparadise.com/
- eamonnsullivan 4y ago
  What I like about RadioParadise is that I don't have to pigeon-hole the music I listen to. Sometimes you do want a particular genre, and other times I'm happy to be led by an expert curator. RadioParadise is superb for the latter.
- loudmax 4y ago
  I love Radio Paradise! One of the best things about it is how the main mix transcends genres. I consider it basically a rock station, but they'll also play Country, Jazz, Blues, Pop, Classical and miscellaneous other stuff. In a single song set you can easily go from Led Zeppelin to Radiohead to Johnny Cash to Arctic Monkeys to Stevie Wonder to Billie Eilish to JS Brahms to some West African singer you'd never had heard of otherwise. It's great for musical discovery.
- anderiv 4y ago
  Agreed! I've been "harvesting" their playlist (via their published RSS feed) for ~5 years now, storing an entry for each played song in a MySQL db table. I'm not doing anything with this data right now, but at some point in the future when Bill & Rebecca retire, I take comfort in knowing I'll be able to munge together a lot of RP-quality playlists. :)
  - indigodaddy 4y ago
    Any possibility of sharing that on GitHub or similar? I and I’m sure others would be interested! And if you decide to do so, thank you for your hard work!
- nodomain 4y ago
  Thanks dude, long forgotten! I was listening to it some 15 years ago...
neals 4y ago
Wow, I totally forget about this since Spotify. I used to listen to Groobe Salad all the time :) Thanks, donating and tuning in to some nice ambient beats and grooves!
iisan7 4y ago
First used it as background music for a 60s secret agent themed party. Since then it's been a holiday tradition to listen to the Christmas stations. Every year when I find out it's still online it's like a nice present.
moralestapia 4y ago
PopTron was my favorite station for years, many good memories there. Give them a chance if you haven't yet.
petecooper 4y ago
I made a $50 donation many years ago, and some months later a black t-shirt with SOMA FM emblazoned on it arrived completely out of the blue. To this day, it's the only garment I own (and still wear) with a story attached.
ryandrake 4y ago
I found SomaFM to be a much better music discovery experience than the "big company" generic recommendation systems. I found some real gems there, and the gem-to-vanilla ratio is higher than most. I assume SomaFM's playlists must be manually/human curated, with tracks rotated in and out regularly, to be this good.
toomanyrichies 4y ago
Oh man! I haven't listened to SomaFM since like 2007. So glad they're still around, can't wait to dive back into my old favorite channels, like "Drone Zone" and "Secret Agent". Gonna start a recurring donation as well.
cartoonfoxes 4y ago
I remember this from way back when, even the channel icons, but it had blurred together with Digitally Imported. I didn't realize it was a separate entity until now.
jmclnx 4y ago
Listening to it now, and I did donate :)
idid 4y ago
SomaFM is an amazing institution. I was introduced to it mid/early 2000's by travelling tech nomad from Germany that passed by Bucharest; I spread it to my family (dad keeps a recurring donation going and we have a family heirloom soma fm t-shirt). Fast forward to now, my 2mo old seems to enjoy Space Station Soma, and, if I'm lucky, falls asleep on Deep Space One. I hope future generations will get to enjoy it. As others said (tbatchelli), "it's an example of how we believed the Internet is going to be". Thanks!
tonyfader 4y ago
SomaFM has always ruled, and will continue to rule for the foreseeable future. Also, Starstreams is old-school and remains great. Easiest to listen to them via iHeartRadio app on my TV these days.. Mixcloud is fantastic as well. And Mixlr is nice depending on the DJ.
cityzen 4y ago
Groove salad!
browningstreet 4y ago
My streaming life is mostly Radio Paradise and GrooveSalad (both). I’ve spent time looking for more stations to love (esp since my car streams TuneIn) but I haven’t really found other stations out there to listen to on the regular. They’re pretty singular.
werds 4y ago
i have to shoutout to another online radio station that is run in the same vein as SomaFM https://vintageobscura.net/ https://vintageobscura.net/
mythrwy 4y ago
I friggen love SomaFM. I found it by accident over a decade ago on a Slackware installations (of all things). Was looking through possible Bash command prompts by typing letters and hitting tab for autocomplete. "Hey, what is that? soma? what does that command do?" (It was a terminal music player with a number of stations, primarily SomaFM programmed in. There was another one called "Air Lounge" or something that was also good). And boom, Groove Salad and Beat Blender were realized.
thcipriani 4y ago
I still listen to SomaFM on the Logitech squeezeboxes littered around my house. My streaming music experience is stalled out in 2005, but I'm still blown away by how awesome it is. I'm grateful for SomaFM.
- kylebgorman 4y ago
  I have the same set-up: SomaFM (and a Pi with an external hard disk) and three Squeezeboxes all in sync.
mergy 4y ago
Wonderful to see SomaFM getting some visibility here. Groove Salad and XMas in Frisco have always been great for me. Rusty has been a constant honestly since the end of the 90s and always been the go-to for me. Great Roku app too btw.
jmspring 4y ago
Listening to it right now. It's an easy platform to explore a bunch of different music. I'm usually parked on Secret Agent, Boot Liquor and occasionally other channels. Reminds me I should donate (which I do with random regularity).
harel 4y ago
Around 1999 I created thumpradio.com, which was the "streaming" website for the Thump Radio radio show and (mad) parties in San Francisco. The site streamed all the radio shows, DJ sets (in RealAudio) and had artist bios and track downloads. You could stream music interwoven with interviews for days on end. The site is long gone, with some ghosts of it on the Wayback Machine but I have forever memories from that time.
- blevin 4y ago
  Still have cassette tapes of Thump Radio shows on KUSF, and memories of enjoying the RealAudio sets. I also remember them calling out the show identification in various languages, where the only words I understood were at the end: “… Thump Radio.” Great stuff — thank you.
  - harel 4y ago
    HA! I recorded one of those show ids in Hebrew at the time. Completely forgot about that. I am pretty sure all those recordings do exist somewhere. Mason Rothert was doing all things radio there and it was beautiful to watch (and listen).
lepasana 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this page with all HN visitors. I didn't know it until today. I see that all the folks around here have a great teast with all this old stuff from the early days of the Internet, it reminds me that old time too.
spencerflem 4y ago
This is a cool site! Thank you for showing me it <3
asselinpaul 4y ago
https://worldwidefm.net https://worldwidefm.net is worth a listen
Legion 4y ago
Love SomaFM, have their 15 year anniversary channel list poster up in my office. Been listening since the days of the original 3 channels (Groove Salad / Drone Zone / Secret Agent). I loved so much when cliqhop came out and streamed more abstract electronic music, especially since "electronic music" in streaming was always so heavily either ambient (cool) or club/dance music (ehh). But I really want to highlight Metal Detector, the metal channel they started a few years ago. I've always found metal streaming stations underwhelming. MD is the first one I've heard that effortlessly cuts broadly across the various subgenres and eras, and doesn't fall into the traps of just playing the arena-filling stuff, or getting locked into one specific niche.
edbaskerville 4y ago
Happy to learn about this. I'm going to add a shout-out to my lower-tech SF favorite, community-supported KPOO 89.5, featuring a wonderful array of programs hosted by kindly volunteer DJs. Plus, their stream works most of the time. (If you're in range, I recommend sticking to actual FM to be safe.)
- aeschenbach 4y ago
  baby bay-bay!
aarestad 4y ago
I found SomaFM 22(!) years ago via Shoutcast, and have been a listener ever since, even making sure to come back after they briefly went off the air due to an early-00s fight over streaming fees. Love it love it. Thanks for keeping SomaFM ad-free all these years, Rusty - I will donate till I die. <3
jonahbenton 4y ago
+1000. Off and on listener and subscriber for 20 years. After dropping Spotify, adding them back to my subscription cohort.
AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
I see alot of ambient/electronic radios, but not much by way of pure chiptune. Which is a pity. I haven't found a true replacement for kohina.com yet, and that site is surely only hanging on until someone remembers that they're still paying a hosting bill.
leokennis 4y ago
Personally I love https://www.di.fm https://www.di.fm which is similar but geared towards electronic music. They have fantastic channels for most subgenres (think “dub techno”, “disco house” etc.) and they stream in 320kbps. I don’t claim golden ears but Soma FM streaming at 128kbps seems needlessly outdated?
gamedna 4y ago
God I miss Tag's trance trip. (@tagloomis) https://twitter.com/tagloomis https://twitter.com/tagloomis eventually merged with soma but its not the same as it used to be. Now its called the trip.
sakopov 4y ago
Wow, I haven't heard this name for a while. I switched from Soma to DI.FM years and years ago mostly because I was super active on DI's forums and they used to stream my mixes. Glad to see it's still around. It's definitely a gem from the old days of internet.
habi 4y ago
I have these three aliases in my ~/.bashrc: alias somafm='mplayer -really-quiet -vo none -volume 128 -playlist http://somafm.com/groovesalad.pls' alias goa='mplayer -really-quiet -vo none -volume 128 -playlist http://somafm.com/suburbsofgoa.pls' alias beatblender='mplayer -really-quiet -vo none -volume 128 -playlist https://somafm.com/beatblender.pls' Thanks for the reminder to donate again!
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  Nice :) Doesn't `volume 128` saturate sound though ?
  - habi 4y ago
    No, if I don’t set it that high the volume is much lower than the system volume.
  - godDLL 4y ago
    I have a 2009 Mini connected to a Creative Labs 2.1 and it does. But then, there's a Lenovo Yoga from like 2016 that plugs into a pair of SOLO7c and that doesn't. Different stations I start with volume 55-85, they don't all have the same loudness (genre related, no doubt). But the use for radio is for me "fill space, drown out distractions, provide flow" so that I don't need it loud. I'm not actively listening to radio. I didn't choose the song. And that's the point.
    - johnchristopher 4y ago
      > I'm not actively listening to radio. I didn't choose the song. And that's the point. Who are you arguing with ?
cuhlur 4y ago
Been listening to for years. Indie Pop Rocks is great. If you use TuneIn you can favorite songs.
nyanpasu64 4y ago
They have an Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgmltn.radiomg.somafm https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgmltn.rad..., https://radiomg.pw/ https://radiomg.pw/) but sadly it does not appear to be open-source.
rvbissell 4y ago
Thanks to this HN post, I just installed the Android app of SomaFM. But, I can't find a way to re-orient the app to landscape mode on my tablet. Is this not supported?
captaincaveman 4y ago
Used to listen to these guys years ago, lost track of them, glad to see they are still going.
johnchristopher 4y ago
I have been listening to SomaFM for more than 15 years now. There are some real gems on it. It's a vestige of what was one of the best time for internet at the turn of the century. I often set deep space one to a 15 minutes timer before falling asleep. The only thing I don't like is how 1 out of every 25 songs is just random noises with out of tune deep bass. Oh well, then I switch to drone zone or liquid or something :).
karlzt 4y ago
I miss: https://www.digitalgunfire.com/ https://www.digitalgunfire.com/. :(
haloblue 4y ago
Been listening to SomaFM and donating since 2003 or so. Love these guys.
pixelrevision 4y ago
I’m so glad SomaFM is still around. It’s one of the last holdouts from when the internet was just a giant pool of possibilities. So much at that time was people just doing fun things because they could and while that’s still out there, most of what I see these days seems to be people optimizing the fun out of everything. DroneZone for me tonight.
WalterBright 4y ago
SomaFM is my favorite station. I've tried many other internet stations, and they all fail for the same reasons: 1. they repeat after 1 or 2 days 2. and worst of all, they repeat the same 3 commercials constantly, until I want to scream
IronWolve 4y ago
Check out streamtuner2 it has lots of streaming services plugins for icecast/Xiph/somafm/internet radio/etc. Multi platform linux/win/mac/etc. Written in python. https://milki.include-once.org/streamtuner2 https://milki.include-once.org/streamtuner2
hotwire 4y ago
I still remember and miss http://bluemars.org/ http://bluemars.org/ I discovered so much beautiful ambient music back in the early/mid 2000s.
thadk 4y ago
The SomaFM macOS/iOS apps, of course, use SQLite to save favorited songs by station. I always donate to Soma too, but it is nice that once curated, you can often also enjoy, export, or transfer artist tracks you love to on demand services using Datasette or otherwise: `/Users/{USER}/Library/Containers/com.somafm.somafmmac/Data/Library/Application\ Support/SomaFM/SomaFM.sqlite3.db` or `/Users/{USER}/Library/Containers/SomaFM/Data/Library/Application\ Support/SomaFM/SomaFM.sqlite3.db`
odiroot 4y ago
Underground 80s has been my favourite station for years.
b3nji 4y ago
Discovered this for myself the other week. I love it! More epic and amazing project and sites like this, please.
LittleBox 4y ago
Now I finally found out where the app Sleep as Android gets its "space station" ringtone from!
deekayw0n 4y ago
SomaFM has been the soundtrack to about half of my life. In fact one of my daughters was pseudo-named after one of the DJ's. Thanks Elise for being so consistently awesome for so long and clearly an inspiration! Additionally, I've been meaning to simplify adding SomaFM tracks that I like to Spotify playlists. This post inspired some real-time action... one click in the SomaFM app would be peachy, but I can deal with a keyboard combo. It's a bit difficult to be get the exact song without the DJ's providing the Spotify song id but the metadata SomaFM does provide in their icecast streams [or sqlite db or www song history] is good enough to formulate a pretty good Spotify search (e.g. `spotify:search:artist:Brazilian%20Girls+track:Homme`). You can easily associate the following code to a keyboard shortcut via Automator and have it search for the LIKELY song in the Spotify app. I present somafmToSpotify.js: https://gist.github.com/deekayw0n/ab96a596c16371e3968b7eea48a5d5ae https://gist.github.com/deekayw0n/ab96a596c16371e3968b7eea48... Hope it helps with your #life-hacking
fziz 4y ago
Thanks for sharing. Didn't know about SomaFM. I've been listening to plusfm.net for more than 15 years now which is in some ways similar. Just want to give David (running Plus FM) a shout out.
havblue 4y ago
I volunteered to DJ my jazz college radio station back in the day and gave up quickly. The reason being was that my knowledge of the genre was so shallow that I didn't know where to start, especially when it came to putting music on for a dedicated radio program. So I kind of wonder about that when listening to indie music. Maybe there isn't a goal of getting a comprehensive view on a genre, simply enjoying music that's not overproduced and the same thing you hear all the time? I suppose that's what I get hung up on: that when I listen to music I think I have a goal of understanding a genre from the top down. This isn't a criticism of course. The likely response is that I should just listen and "enjoy the music" without expectations of gaining a deep knowledge of the craft. It's still something I struggle to wrap my head around though.
Teraloo 4y ago
Another big Thumbs Up for soma. I like DroneZone for entering the outer aura...
vlark 4y ago
Nobody's mentioned it yet, but AccuRadio is another community-supported music streaming service: https://www.accuradio.com/ https://www.accuradio.com/
jrnichols 4y ago
I still have bookmarks for groove salad and occasionally use them - on a 1.25ghz iMac G4 from years ago. The old Mac OS 9 version of iTunes still works and still plays internet radio streams.

679 points by Datenstrom 4y ago

Found this thanks to HN and have been really enjoying it for work and study music over the last month. It's hard to keep a good playlist that doesn't get stale, anyone have other stations? I also use Music for Programming[1] and various lofi playlists often. [1]: https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/ https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/

nittanymount 4y ago

this is great! has been listening for a while when need a nice background music at work

5- 4y ago

see also: https://poolsuite.net https://poolsuite.net

rektide 4y ago

I really miss Shoutcast/Icecast being such an active part of my life. The quality is way down, and there's like 1/6th the channels there used to be. For electronica in particular, there was just so much. But there were also so many random niche stations! SomaFM continues to be a great place for highly genre-d music. I make sure to give em money semi-regularly. Suburbs of Goa[1] is one of my favorite. [1] https://somafm.com/suburbsofgoa/ https://somafm.com/suburbsofgoa/

soylentcola 4y ago
There are still quite a few though. I have several bookmarks on my normal PC and in AIMP on mobile. I never did "outgrow" my practice of using multiple bookmarked streaming stations as my daily "radio dial".
bambataa 4y ago
There may not be as much Icecast stuff but internet radio is doing very well. Someone else has already mentioned nts.live (it has a huge range of stuff, more like a radio station) but other UK-based stations are balamii.com, supremefm.com and rinse.fm (Rinse used to be a pirate radio station but went legal). Internet radio stations are the go to for up to date music really.
foresto 4y ago
> For electronica in particular, there was just so much. But there were also so many random niche stations! Indeed. I remember regularly switching between Massinova and a rebroadcast Polish classical station whose DJ had a nice voice.
meanmrmustard92 4y ago
Shpongle and OTT are amazing goa-ish electronica. OTT's new album is great.

threeio 4y ago

Good to know SomaFM is still round, its been 20+ years at this point.

kacy 4y ago

I've probably been streaming SomaFM off and on for the last 15-20 years. Thanks for the reminder to donate!

codetrotter 4y ago

I think I used to listen to SomaFM, or something with a similar name. If so then that’s one of the radio streams I found via the xiph Icecast directory. https://dir.xiph.org/ https://dir.xiph.org/ You can listen to these Icecast stations using for example VLC media player, or mpv, or you can also play them directly in most web browsers.

ilkka_es 4y ago

I discovered SomaFM channels (SomaFM, Secret agent, GrooveSalad) from iTunes Radio around 2003. Listened to it always while working on my computer while studying in university. Good memories and so happy they are still around!

tarentel 4y ago
Same here. I didn't realize it was still around and not only that the links still open in the apple music desktop app and you can save them in a playlist. Unfortunately doesn't look like they carry over to the phone app but they have a paid app.

guerrilla 4y ago

Really impressive that they've stayed online nearly 20 years. I used to listen to this and MonkeyRadio all the time. They've added a lot of new channels though.

a-dub 4y ago
hah! was just wondering what happened to monkeyradio... iirc it was one of the winamp developers who did the selecting...
- guerrilla 4y ago
  It died but the playlists are on Spotify and elsewhere.
threeme3 4y ago
Me too.. monkey radio was really great! https://web.archive.org/web/20040622004325/http://www.monkeyradio.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040622004325/http://www.monkey...

electrotype 4y ago

SomaFM is one of the sites I like to donate to when I can. I also use their Amazon affiliate link as an Amazon bookmark. Drone Zone has been my main background music when working for a couple of years now!

jordanpg 4y ago

First music I ever "streamed" and still excellent. Thank you, Rusty!

skor 4y ago

big thank you to somafm!! sidetracking a little here but a good one for idm is https://verdure.net/ https://verdure.net/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gorekee 4y ago
The page isn't working for me. I get a error in the console and on url https://verdure.net:8443/radio/192/ https://verdure.net:8443/radio/192/ is going nowhere.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dobin 4y ago

Listening to this since musciforhackers.com went down. Donated a bitcoin back when they were still cheap. Rusty also DJ's at Defcon.

_jal 4y ago

Definitely one of the gems of what we now call the indie-web. I envy Rusty his attention span.

lushdog 4y ago

https://psychedelicized.com/ https://psychedelicized.com/ Has some nice unknown 60-70s psychedelic tracks. Let are lots unknown good but also very bad stuff from this time. Fun to listen to while working.

spiffydave 4y ago

Love it! Been a fan for many years. Would still love to find the archive of music/sounds from musicforhackers.com from years ago. That was an epic channel.

siegelzero 4y ago
Did you mean this site? It has some pretty great content. https://musicforprogramming.net/one https://musicforprogramming.net/one
- spiffydave 4y ago
  That is cool! But no, Music for Hackers was a great combo of ambient/underground music overlaid with old movie audio samples and other stuff. Played from maybe 2000-2008 or something? Can't remember when it died. https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforhackers.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforha...
  - matthewn 4y ago
    I have very fond memories of Music for Hackers ("soundscapes for compromising a remote host"). Have never found anything that fills that particular niche the same way.
piebob 4y ago
you might like the DEFCON channel on somafm

zeruch 4y ago

The fact that they are still around is a testament to "Web 1.0" always having been worthwhile...

linsomniac 4y ago

I had somehow forgotten about SomaFM, used to listen to it all the time but haven't in over a decade. I think I thought it had been shut down, I'm probably thinking of LastFM.

spiffydave 4y ago

This page from the Wayback Machine brings back so many memories from MusicforHackers.com: https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforhackers.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforha...

dijit 4y ago

SomaFM was what I used to listen to on backtrack Linux back in the day, as it was one of the sites bookmarked in firefox. wierdly enough I literally remembered about them 2 hours ago and put on defcon radio. Weird to see it pop up again now after i had forgot about it for so long.

Lapsa 4y ago

soma is awesome indeed. long time listener

W-Stool 4y ago

I've been donating to SomaFM for many years, and it is my music provider of choice in my home office (Space Station Soma for me). Some years ago I had an afternoon to kill while visiting San Francisco and Rusty was kind enough to let me stop by and say hello. A quick 10 minute visit turned into one of the most interesting two hours I've spent in my entire life. Rusty gave me the whole tour of the software interface that runs SomaFM and we had a fascinating discussion about the history of SomaFM in particular and streaming music in general. Thanks again Rusty!

netsharc 4y ago
Did you meet Big Url too?
- W-Stool 4y ago
  I always thought it was "Big Earl". You're right!
- gigama 4y ago
  Well, I've known Url since he was just a little Perl script. <g>
rosseloh 4y ago
It's been several years but I also had the pleasure of meeting Rusty down at the studio once. My dad has now made it a habit; he's been to SF for work and pleasure four or five times now, and met up with him each time, I believe. I have been listening to Soma for at least 15 years. Definitely a great place to have bookmarked.
- baobob 4y ago
  I've been listening since 2004. Every 4 or 5 years I'll realize how much it's been a part of my life through thick and thin, and write him a gushing email. He always has the grace to reply. Would absolutely love to meet him some day
meerita 4y ago

xenon2 4y ago

internetvin 4y ago

If you’re into unique well curated collections of music across wide ranges of genres, I highly recommend checking out NTS Radio, it’s also listener supported: https://nts.live https://nts.live

itsoktocry 4y ago

So awesome to see this here. Been listening to, donating to and recommending SomaFM since for 15 years.

pixel_tracing 4y ago

Can I run this from terminal, and fantastic for producing this

dataqat 4y ago
Just saw this Mac CLI player referenced on Reddit https://github.com/rockymadden/somafm-cli https://github.com/rockymadden/somafm-cli

tbatchelli 4y ago

SomeFM is such a rarity these days, a reminder of how we believed the Internet was going to be. They take recurring donations. Probably the best way to help them and one of the best investments for me, as keeping it up and running is a way to keep these naive ideas alive. The music is curated and is most excellent (for my taste, of course). I have Groove Salad on speed dial in my HomePods around the house (through TuneIn radio). Thank you Rusty for sticking with it!

paulcole 4y ago
> SomeFM is such a rarity these days, a reminder of how we believed the Internet was going to be. Let me start out by saying that SomaFM is great. But when I started listening to SomaFM (nearly 20 years ago), I never imagined that for only $10/month I'd be able to listen to (essentially) any song whenever I wanted. That's amazing and so much more valuable (to me) than what Soma offers.
- huron 4y ago
  But how do you find new songs for you to put on your playlists? That’s why SomaFM and online stations like KCRW are so valuable. They’re ways to introduce new music and even new styles of music to the listeners.
  - kleiba 4y ago
    Isn't that what recommender systems are for? /scnr
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      They can only recommend what they understand. I am not aware of any automated recommender that listens to music to make decisions on how to recommend it. For that, humans are still good.
      - kleiba 4y ago

wrycoder 4y ago

My favorite SomaFM channel is Doomed. But, they now run it only around the time of Halloween. I would categorize it as Halloween Dark Industrial Ambient. They had a new channel, The Dark Zone, which ran for awhile as a Special. It was OK, but Doomed is unique.

spookybones 4y ago
Yes, I loved both! Hope they bring back one of them year round.

kofejnik 4y ago

Wow, no mention of chromanova.de yet?

unova 4y ago

Thanks for this! This made my day/week/month :D

seydor 4y ago

I don't understand why internet radio has died. Sure, spotify etc but broadcast music is different. Radio didn't die because CDs existed

kdmccormick 4y ago
did $10/mo give you access to almost every CD ever released, playable anywhere?
- myself248 4y ago
  I've recently gone back to buying CDs. I got annoyed with stuff "going gray" in my Spotify playlists, just vanishing out of the blue after I'd fallen in love with it and wanted it to be part of my mood and given that mood a name and curated a whole menagerie to go with it. Soma's no answer to that, so this is way off-topic. But streaming services are no replacement for the CD. I'll rip and encode and curate on my own devices, especially now that it's trivial to pop a 128GB microSD card into my phone.
  - kdmccormick 4y ago
    I'm with you. But you can imagine that for the average listener, especially those with limited free time and disposable income, tracks going gray is rare enough that it doesn't warrant switching back to buying CDs.
- seydor 4y ago
  it's enough to buy 1 album per month. of course it s not the same, but i don't like to listen to every cd ever. The rare times i really wanted to hear something i could pirate it. I still enjoy radio streams for the low mental overhead though, plus u get the news too
  - kdmccormick 4y ago
    Yeah, I totally agree. I'm just responding to the comment: > I don't understand why internet radio has died. Sure, spotify etc but broadcast music is different. Radio didn't die because CDs existed My point is that CDs and subscription streaming are two totally different beasts, and it's not surprising that the latter was more of a disruptor to FM/internet radio.

jacamera 4y ago

A lot has changed over the past 20 years but playing http://somafm.com/groovesalad.pls http://somafm.com/groovesalad.pls on Winamp remains the same. I started donating $5/mo a few years ago because I appreciate having such a valuable constant in my life more and more as time goes on.

drorwolmer 4y ago

I created https://wfh.dj https://wfh.dj so I can listen to new music from my subscriptions (>20m) without the youtube procrastination rabbit hole. Mostly House, Electronic, Jazz (Stuff me and the team like to listen to while we work).

nop_slide 4y ago
This is rad. I've been getting to House since I started working from home (no pun intended). Check out mood:indigo, might make a good additions to your playlists! https://soundcloud.com/moodindigo72 https://soundcloud.com/moodindigo72

tootie 4y ago

Neat. I do this with public radio (KCRW, WQXR, WFMU) but this opens up a lot of variety.

joemi 4y ago
WFMU is truly amazing. I've been listening to them for decades, have several friends who have done shows there and/or volunteered, and I even performed live on air there once many years ago. But what's truly amazing is their show archives and playlists, almost all the shows are recorded and streamable, going back many many years. There are a bunch of radio stations that get this right currently, but WFMU is one of the only ones (or maybe THE only one?) that's been getting it right for soooooo long.
quantumfissure 4y ago
Consider adding WXPN to your repertoire. They're out of the University of Pennsylvania in Philly. Incredible selection of music and commercial free. https://xpn.org/ https://xpn.org/

binwiederhier 4y ago

I re-discovered SomaFM the other day. I was listening to that maybe 15 years ago. I couldn't believe it was still online. Great music.

Claude_Shannon 4y ago

Thanks for sharing this website, it's really great! :)

arprocter 4y ago

This and Digitally Imported has gotten me through a lot

alex_suzuki 4y ago
DI.FM! Thanks for that litte trip down memory lane. Will tune in tonight if it‘s still online.
- axefrog 4y ago
  Di.fm has a modern UI and going as strong as ever.
dleslie 4y ago
I've been a di.fm subscriber for longer than I care to recall. Great service.

vlod 4y ago

Thanks for the reminder to donate. I've been getting into DEFCON radio. I like all the 'quirky' clips. Even tempted to go to the conference this year.

helios_invictus 4y ago
You mean these clips?! http://nerdshow.com/def-con-somafm-clips-with-quotes/ http://nerdshow.com/def-con-somafm-clips-with-quotes/
- vlod 4y ago
  Yep. thanks!

eatwater123 4y ago

My favourite. Please remember to donate if you can! A little slice of internet & music heaven.

amerine 4y ago

Groove Salad For Lyfe

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Groove Salad, or Groove Salad Classic?
- vlowther 4y ago
  Yes.

pdxpatzer 4y ago

thank you for the reminder to donate ! I listen to soma.fm all the time

justinzollars 4y ago

I used to listen to SomaFM in 2005 while I was in Grad School! It was awesome!

indigodaddy 4y ago

Radio Paradise [1] is also going strong after 20+ years. Fantastic curation and you can even stream in lossless for free (or at least I seem to be able to from the Android TV app). [1] https://radioparadise.com/ https://radioparadise.com/

eamonnsullivan 4y ago
What I like about RadioParadise is that I don't have to pigeon-hole the music I listen to. Sometimes you do want a particular genre, and other times I'm happy to be led by an expert curator. RadioParadise is superb for the latter.
loudmax 4y ago
I love Radio Paradise! One of the best things about it is how the main mix transcends genres. I consider it basically a rock station, but they'll also play Country, Jazz, Blues, Pop, Classical and miscellaneous other stuff. In a single song set you can easily go from Led Zeppelin to Radiohead to Johnny Cash to Arctic Monkeys to Stevie Wonder to Billie Eilish to JS Brahms to some West African singer you'd never had heard of otherwise. It's great for musical discovery.
anderiv 4y ago
Agreed! I've been "harvesting" their playlist (via their published RSS feed) for ~5 years now, storing an entry for each played song in a MySQL db table. I'm not doing anything with this data right now, but at some point in the future when Bill & Rebecca retire, I take comfort in knowing I'll be able to munge together a lot of RP-quality playlists. :)
- indigodaddy 4y ago
  Any possibility of sharing that on GitHub or similar? I and I’m sure others would be interested! And if you decide to do so, thank you for your hard work!
nodomain 4y ago
Thanks dude, long forgotten! I was listening to it some 15 years ago...

neals 4y ago

Wow, I totally forget about this since Spotify. I used to listen to Groobe Salad all the time :) Thanks, donating and tuning in to some nice ambient beats and grooves!

iisan7 4y ago

First used it as background music for a 60s secret agent themed party. Since then it's been a holiday tradition to listen to the Christmas stations. Every year when I find out it's still online it's like a nice present.

moralestapia 4y ago

PopTron was my favorite station for years, many good memories there. Give them a chance if you haven't yet.

petecooper 4y ago

I made a $50 donation many years ago, and some months later a black t-shirt with SOMA FM emblazoned on it arrived completely out of the blue. To this day, it's the only garment I own (and still wear) with a story attached.

ryandrake 4y ago

I found SomaFM to be a much better music discovery experience than the "big company" generic recommendation systems. I found some real gems there, and the gem-to-vanilla ratio is higher than most. I assume SomaFM's playlists must be manually/human curated, with tracks rotated in and out regularly, to be this good.

toomanyrichies 4y ago

Oh man! I haven't listened to SomaFM since like 2007. So glad they're still around, can't wait to dive back into my old favorite channels, like "Drone Zone" and "Secret Agent". Gonna start a recurring donation as well.

cartoonfoxes 4y ago

I remember this from way back when, even the channel icons, but it had blurred together with Digitally Imported. I didn't realize it was a separate entity until now.

jmclnx 4y ago

Listening to it now, and I did donate :)

idid 4y ago

SomaFM is an amazing institution. I was introduced to it mid/early 2000's by travelling tech nomad from Germany that passed by Bucharest; I spread it to my family (dad keeps a recurring donation going and we have a family heirloom soma fm t-shirt). Fast forward to now, my 2mo old seems to enjoy Space Station Soma, and, if I'm lucky, falls asleep on Deep Space One. I hope future generations will get to enjoy it. As others said (tbatchelli), "it's an example of how we believed the Internet is going to be". Thanks!

tonyfader 4y ago

SomaFM has always ruled, and will continue to rule for the foreseeable future. Also, Starstreams is old-school and remains great. Easiest to listen to them via iHeartRadio app on my TV these days.. Mixcloud is fantastic as well. And Mixlr is nice depending on the DJ.

cityzen 4y ago

Groove salad!

browningstreet 4y ago

My streaming life is mostly Radio Paradise and GrooveSalad (both). I’ve spent time looking for more stations to love (esp since my car streams TuneIn) but I haven’t really found other stations out there to listen to on the regular. They’re pretty singular.

werds 4y ago

i have to shoutout to another online radio station that is run in the same vein as SomaFM https://vintageobscura.net/ https://vintageobscura.net/

mythrwy 4y ago

I friggen love SomaFM. I found it by accident over a decade ago on a Slackware installations (of all things). Was looking through possible Bash command prompts by typing letters and hitting tab for autocomplete. "Hey, what is that? soma? what does that command do?" (It was a terminal music player with a number of stations, primarily SomaFM programmed in. There was another one called "Air Lounge" or something that was also good). And boom, Groove Salad and Beat Blender were realized.

thcipriani 4y ago

I still listen to SomaFM on the Logitech squeezeboxes littered around my house. My streaming music experience is stalled out in 2005, but I'm still blown away by how awesome it is. I'm grateful for SomaFM.

kylebgorman 4y ago
I have the same set-up: SomaFM (and a Pi with an external hard disk) and three Squeezeboxes all in sync.

mergy 4y ago

Wonderful to see SomaFM getting some visibility here. Groove Salad and XMas in Frisco have always been great for me. Rusty has been a constant honestly since the end of the 90s and always been the go-to for me. Great Roku app too btw.

jmspring 4y ago

Listening to it right now. It's an easy platform to explore a bunch of different music. I'm usually parked on Secret Agent, Boot Liquor and occasionally other channels. Reminds me I should donate (which I do with random regularity).

harel 4y ago

Around 1999 I created thumpradio.com, which was the "streaming" website for the Thump Radio radio show and (mad) parties in San Francisco. The site streamed all the radio shows, DJ sets (in RealAudio) and had artist bios and track downloads. You could stream music interwoven with interviews for days on end. The site is long gone, with some ghosts of it on the Wayback Machine but I have forever memories from that time.

blevin 4y ago
Still have cassette tapes of Thump Radio shows on KUSF, and memories of enjoying the RealAudio sets. I also remember them calling out the show identification in various languages, where the only words I understood were at the end: “… Thump Radio.” Great stuff — thank you.
- harel 4y ago
  HA! I recorded one of those show ids in Hebrew at the time. Completely forgot about that. I am pretty sure all those recordings do exist somewhere. Mason Rothert was doing all things radio there and it was beautiful to watch (and listen).

lepasana 4y ago

Thanks for sharing this page with all HN visitors. I didn't know it until today. I see that all the folks around here have a great teast with all this old stuff from the early days of the Internet, it reminds me that old time too.

spencerflem 4y ago

This is a cool site! Thank you for showing me it <3

asselinpaul 4y ago

https://worldwidefm.net https://worldwidefm.net is worth a listen

Legion 4y ago

Love SomaFM, have their 15 year anniversary channel list poster up in my office. Been listening since the days of the original 3 channels (Groove Salad / Drone Zone / Secret Agent). I loved so much when cliqhop came out and streamed more abstract electronic music, especially since "electronic music" in streaming was always so heavily either ambient (cool) or club/dance music (ehh). But I really want to highlight Metal Detector, the metal channel they started a few years ago. I've always found metal streaming stations underwhelming. MD is the first one I've heard that effortlessly cuts broadly across the various subgenres and eras, and doesn't fall into the traps of just playing the arena-filling stuff, or getting locked into one specific niche.

edbaskerville 4y ago

Happy to learn about this. I'm going to add a shout-out to my lower-tech SF favorite, community-supported KPOO 89.5, featuring a wonderful array of programs hosted by kindly volunteer DJs. Plus, their stream works most of the time. (If you're in range, I recommend sticking to actual FM to be safe.)

aeschenbach 4y ago
baby bay-bay!

aarestad 4y ago

I found SomaFM 22(!) years ago via Shoutcast, and have been a listener ever since, even making sure to come back after they briefly went off the air due to an early-00s fight over streaming fees. Love it love it. Thanks for keeping SomaFM ad-free all these years, Rusty - I will donate till I die. <3

jonahbenton 4y ago

+1000. Off and on listener and subscriber for 20 years. After dropping Spotify, adding them back to my subscription cohort.

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago

I see alot of ambient/electronic radios, but not much by way of pure chiptune. Which is a pity. I haven't found a true replacement for kohina.com yet, and that site is surely only hanging on until someone remembers that they're still paying a hosting bill.

leokennis 4y ago

Personally I love https://www.di.fm https://www.di.fm which is similar but geared towards electronic music. They have fantastic channels for most subgenres (think “dub techno”, “disco house” etc.) and they stream in 320kbps. I don’t claim golden ears but Soma FM streaming at 128kbps seems needlessly outdated?

gamedna 4y ago

God I miss Tag's trance trip. (@tagloomis) https://twitter.com/tagloomis https://twitter.com/tagloomis eventually merged with soma but its not the same as it used to be. Now its called the trip.

sakopov 4y ago

Wow, I haven't heard this name for a while. I switched from Soma to DI.FM years and years ago mostly because I was super active on DI's forums and they used to stream my mixes. Glad to see it's still around. It's definitely a gem from the old days of internet.

habi 4y ago

I have these three aliases in my ~/.bashrc: alias somafm='mplayer -really-quiet -vo none -volume 128 -playlist http://somafm.com/groovesalad.pls' alias goa='mplayer -really-quiet -vo none -volume 128 -playlist http://somafm.com/suburbsofgoa.pls' alias beatblender='mplayer -really-quiet -vo none -volume 128 -playlist https://somafm.com/beatblender.pls' Thanks for the reminder to donate again!

johnchristopher 4y ago
Nice :) Doesn't `volume 128` saturate sound though ?
- habi 4y ago
  No, if I don’t set it that high the volume is much lower than the system volume.
- godDLL 4y ago
  I have a 2009 Mini connected to a Creative Labs 2.1 and it does. But then, there's a Lenovo Yoga from like 2016 that plugs into a pair of SOLO7c and that doesn't. Different stations I start with volume 55-85, they don't all have the same loudness (genre related, no doubt). But the use for radio is for me "fill space, drown out distractions, provide flow" so that I don't need it loud. I'm not actively listening to radio. I didn't choose the song. And that's the point.
  - johnchristopher 4y ago
    > I'm not actively listening to radio. I didn't choose the song. And that's the point. Who are you arguing with ?

cuhlur 4y ago

Been listening to for years. Indie Pop Rocks is great. If you use TuneIn you can favorite songs.

nyanpasu64 4y ago

They have an Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgmltn.radiomg.somafm https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgmltn.rad..., https://radiomg.pw/ https://radiomg.pw/) but sadly it does not appear to be open-source.

rvbissell 4y ago

Thanks to this HN post, I just installed the Android app of SomaFM. But, I can't find a way to re-orient the app to landscape mode on my tablet. Is this not supported?

captaincaveman 4y ago

Used to listen to these guys years ago, lost track of them, glad to see they are still going.

johnchristopher 4y ago

I have been listening to SomaFM for more than 15 years now. There are some real gems on it. It's a vestige of what was one of the best time for internet at the turn of the century. I often set deep space one to a 15 minutes timer before falling asleep. The only thing I don't like is how 1 out of every 25 songs is just random noises with out of tune deep bass. Oh well, then I switch to drone zone or liquid or something :).

karlzt 4y ago

I miss: https://www.digitalgunfire.com/ https://www.digitalgunfire.com/. :(

haloblue 4y ago

Been listening to SomaFM and donating since 2003 or so. Love these guys.

pixelrevision 4y ago

I’m so glad SomaFM is still around. It’s one of the last holdouts from when the internet was just a giant pool of possibilities. So much at that time was people just doing fun things because they could and while that’s still out there, most of what I see these days seems to be people optimizing the fun out of everything. DroneZone for me tonight.

WalterBright 4y ago

SomaFM is my favorite station. I've tried many other internet stations, and they all fail for the same reasons: 1. they repeat after 1 or 2 days 2. and worst of all, they repeat the same 3 commercials constantly, until I want to scream

IronWolve 4y ago

Check out streamtuner2 it has lots of streaming services plugins for icecast/Xiph/somafm/internet radio/etc. Multi platform linux/win/mac/etc. Written in python. https://milki.include-once.org/streamtuner2 https://milki.include-once.org/streamtuner2

hotwire 4y ago

I still remember and miss http://bluemars.org/ http://bluemars.org/ I discovered so much beautiful ambient music back in the early/mid 2000s.

thadk 4y ago

The SomaFM macOS/iOS apps, of course, use SQLite to save favorited songs by station. I always donate to Soma too, but it is nice that once curated, you can often also enjoy, export, or transfer artist tracks you love to on demand services using Datasette or otherwise: `/Users/{USER}/Library/Containers/com.somafm.somafmmac/Data/Library/Application\ Support/SomaFM/SomaFM.sqlite3.db` or `/Users/{USER}/Library/Containers/SomaFM/Data/Library/Application\ Support/SomaFM/SomaFM.sqlite3.db`

odiroot 4y ago

Underground 80s has been my favourite station for years.

b3nji 4y ago

Discovered this for myself the other week. I love it! More epic and amazing project and sites like this, please.

LittleBox 4y ago

Now I finally found out where the app Sleep as Android gets its "space station" ringtone from!

deekayw0n 4y ago

SomaFM has been the soundtrack to about half of my life. In fact one of my daughters was pseudo-named after one of the DJ's. Thanks Elise for being so consistently awesome for so long and clearly an inspiration! Additionally, I've been meaning to simplify adding SomaFM tracks that I like to Spotify playlists. This post inspired some real-time action... one click in the SomaFM app would be peachy, but I can deal with a keyboard combo. It's a bit difficult to be get the exact song without the DJ's providing the Spotify song id but the metadata SomaFM does provide in their icecast streams [or sqlite db or www song history] is good enough to formulate a pretty good Spotify search (e.g. `spotify:search:artist:Brazilian%20Girls+track:Homme`). You can easily associate the following code to a keyboard shortcut via Automator and have it search for the LIKELY song in the Spotify app. I present somafmToSpotify.js: https://gist.github.com/deekayw0n/ab96a596c16371e3968b7eea48a5d5ae https://gist.github.com/deekayw0n/ab96a596c16371e3968b7eea48... Hope it helps with your #life-hacking

fziz 4y ago

Thanks for sharing. Didn't know about SomaFM. I've been listening to plusfm.net for more than 15 years now which is in some ways similar. Just want to give David (running Plus FM) a shout out.

havblue 4y ago

I volunteered to DJ my jazz college radio station back in the day and gave up quickly. The reason being was that my knowledge of the genre was so shallow that I didn't know where to start, especially when it came to putting music on for a dedicated radio program. So I kind of wonder about that when listening to indie music. Maybe there isn't a goal of getting a comprehensive view on a genre, simply enjoying music that's not overproduced and the same thing you hear all the time? I suppose that's what I get hung up on: that when I listen to music I think I have a goal of understanding a genre from the top down. This isn't a criticism of course. The likely response is that I should just listen and "enjoy the music" without expectations of gaining a deep knowledge of the craft. It's still something I struggle to wrap my head around though.

Teraloo 4y ago

Another big Thumbs Up for soma. I like DroneZone for entering the outer aura...

vlark 4y ago

Nobody's mentioned it yet, but AccuRadio is another community-supported music streaming service: https://www.accuradio.com/ https://www.accuradio.com/

jrnichols 4y ago

I still have bookmarks for groove salad and occasionally use them - on a 1.25ghz iMac G4 from years ago. The old Mac OS 9 version of iTunes still works and still plays internet radio streams.