So I agree in the sense that, you're always going to rely on something. Even if you're hosting on hardware you own at your house, using your own self-signed SSL certificates, you're still relying on an internet connection from some company.
But, I think using the term "fully-owned" to refer to pushing up to GitHub, then deploying to Cloudflare Pages is definitely not "fully-owned"
What I meant by "fully-owned" is really about owning the content and the workflow: everything lives locally in plain text, versioned in Git, and built with open tools. I can move it to any host without being locked into a platform or losing anything.
You're right that hosting on GitHub and Cloudflare isn't infrastructure ownership. I should’ve been more precise with the wording.
As long as they use their own domain and have that registered with some other registrar they can trivially move the blog to any other hoster, including a random VPS. So while the current setup depends on github and cloudflare they don't hold much power over him.
It's not really fully-owned, but it's owned in the ways that matter most
I think the point is that it's not someone else's blogging service. If CF or GH die, you can port this to some other platform or your own server without losing anything, compared to e.g. blogger.
Chained Ogg FLAC works really well as an intermediary/internal streaming format.
In my case - I have an internet radio station available in a few different codec/bitrate combinations. I generate a chained Ogg FLAC stream so I have in-band metadata with lossless audio.
The stream gets piped into a process that will encode the lossy versions, update metadata the correct way per-stream (like there's HLS with timed ID3, there's Icecast with chained Ogg Opus, Icecast with AAC + Shoutcast-style metadata).
Out of curiosity, can you provide a link to your station? I have created a website for listening lossless internet radio stations: https://audiophile.fm
For FLAC, latency is primarily driven by block size and the library's own internal buffering.
Using the API you can set the blocksize, but there's no manual flush function. The only way to flush output is to call the "finish" function, which as its name implies - marks the stream as finished.
I actually wrote my own FLAC encoder for this exact reason - https://github.com/jprjr/tflac - focused on latency over efficient compression.
The thing I'm excited about is decoding chained Ogg FLAC files.
Some software wouldn't work correctly with FLAC-based Icecast streams if they used libFLAC/libFLAC++ for demuxing and decoding. Usually these streams mux into Ogg and send updated metadata by closing out the previous Ogg bitstream and starting a new one. If you were using libFLAC to demux and decode - when the stream updated, it would just hang forever. Apps would have to do their own Ogg demuxing and reset the decoder between streams.
Chained Ogg FLAC allows having lossless internet radio streams with rich, in-band metadata instead of relying on out-of-band methods. So you could have in-band album art, artist info, links - anything you can cram into a Vorbis comment block.
HTTP streaming is pretty much inherently high latency, or at least none of the software stack is particularly agreeable. I don't think it's fair to say that Opus was made for that purpose in any way that any other general purpose audio codec wasn't. (or even... vorbis really was made for that purpose, though sure you're better off using opus for it).
Lossless audio is unconditionally transparent-- you won't have coding artifacts, you won't have issues with the codec accidentally increasing the crest factor of the audio and creating clipping where there wasn't. If you have the bandwidth for it, why not?
So many people are using streaming in lieu of radio-- a true broadcast medium. I think any high ground to argue efficiency was lost at that point. :) making the streams use 10x the bandwidth? meh. Maybe convincing video sites to provide an option to turn off the video would be a better use of complaint energy: it impacts more people than lossless streaming and wastes a lot more bandwidth :)
Yes yes, you can find any little thing to add as an argument to support "I don't listen to radio", but a lot of us still listen to radio.
Sometimes, you want to find something other than what's in your mp3/CD/cassette collection. Growing up, there were very specific shows that I would listen to specifically for being introduced to something (whether it was new or old and just new to me). Radio did not become a bad experience to me until Clear Channel/Comcast bought up all of the non-indies and made it greater than 80% chance that you'd hear a commercial whenever you tuned into any given station.
I'd also suspect that your "a lot of us" sounds really big in whatever echo chamber you find yourself
Your presumptions are almost as bad as when you assume. Actually, they're better since you can leave the "me" out of the assu prove to be. I've supported my community station KNON since I was in high school. Might have missed here or there, but I've contributed to them longer than anything else.
The only thing dying in this thread are the 3 stations King runs, and whatever notions you thought you had on me.
I have 15 year old vehicles. I listen to the radio in all the cars I drive as does my spouse. The receivers in our vehicles are too old to have Carplay and with the removal of the audio jack in phones there's no way to connect them to the audio system. We do have one vehicle that can stream over Bluetooth but it can be a hassle and distracting in traffic so we usually only use it on road trips. Locally it's easier to turn on the radio and use presets (you can feel them!) to change the channel when it gets annoying. It just works mostly.
USB FM broadcast dongles exist. They transmit at ultra-low power, usually with the option to switch between broadcast frequencies (in the event of interference), and permit your digital device (smartphone, tablet, laptop) to transmit audio directly to your car's stereo. Playback controls are on the device, you can of course vary volume or toggle playback on or off from the vehicle's sound system.
It's not fully-integrated bluetooth or audio-in, but it does work and is an option.
I think licensing becomes a bigger issue if you try to run a radio station on YouTube with any commercial music. Even if you're OK from all copyright perspectives and fully-licensed, YouTube's copyright system is really easy to abuse.
What should be a good deal more cost-effective is an old-fashioned, Icecast/Shoutcast/Azuracast-based internet radio station.
BGM channel is more a cover band than a radio station. I don’t know the details, but it is my impression that YouTube strikes are for copyrighted _recordings_ and not copyrighted written music.
In the same vain, I think that lo fi is more a DJ (in the modern musician sense) that was good at automating and promoting himself rather than someone choosing other people’s recordings. I don’t know the sample sources at all
FM radio is dead and has been for years. I haven't seriously listened to FM radio since I got a portable CD player and that was in the late 90s. I can't imagine anybody trying to get into it now.
Why would I subject myself to obnoxious ads every few minutes and music I don't like when I can just listen to what I want, when I want, ad-free?
AM radio is still going with conspiracy talk and maybe sports radio? I honestly don't know, I've never given AM radio a real listen.
Sometimes I get nostalgic for the radio. I remember calling in to stations and requesting songs, contests, morning zoo hosts, and so on. But it's probably not coming back.
I’m not trying to argue the point, but I listen to FM about every day, or at least every day I’m in the car. It’s much easier for me than getting music from my phone going, even with Bluetooth.
And I have come to the conclusion that I like talk intermixed with music, even if the talk is an ad. It’s weird, I never thought that’d be the case, but I do. In fact, I wish I could easily mix my music library into my podcast library— specifically, interrupt podcasts with music (maybe replace the ads with a single song).
I also like how easy it is to switch channels to something different. I could do that with CarPlay or something too with my own music, but then I probably have to actually think about it (when I should be thinking about driving).
And for people who care about live music events (shows etc) it’s a great way to find out about those things, particularly if your city has a good public radio station and not just iHeartMedia.
I’m not sure I Love radio, but I would probably really miss it if it wasn’t in my car.
Dunno where you are but local radio programming disappeared in most markets years ago. Even in the Bay Area. All of what you've said about radio content was true a decade or more ago, but much less true now.
And for people who care about live music events (shows etc) it’s a
great way to find out about those things
Big stations promote big acts, sure. But that's easy enough to find information on elsewhere (e.g. Youtube). Smaller stations (e.g. KXSF, KPFA, KZSU) out here promote smaller venues but I'm typically out of range and end up listening to their content via the good old internet.
I’m not sure I Love radio, but I would probably really miss it if
it wasn’t in my car.
There was a time I would (late 90s, early 00s) but now? Not so much. The ratio of music to ads has gotten awful. Even stations that have ostensibly gone back to their roots like KITS are a pale imitation of their past glory. Like they'll wear the meat suit of genres that were previously popular but make sure to mix it with plenty of mediocre top 40 and a suffocating amount of ads.
I don’t really listen to radio while traveling so I’ll take your word for it. In Minnesota we gave The Current, part of MPR family of stations which is pretty good from what I hear (about its status nationally, though always some one will say it “used to be better”). And yeah, that’s ONE station.
Probably another part of it for me is that most of drives are probably considered short, the longest trip is usually 20-30 minutes depending on traffic and that’s only a few times a month.
If I was doing hour long commutes, it’d be podcasts all day.
In the MSP area my two main radio stations are both public radio. The state's MPR (Minnesota Public Radio) station and The Current, which is basically what the GP described for the Twin Cities region.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that I'd miss them if they were gone. OK, I really like listening to Terry Gross and Kai Ryssdal but besides that it's just nice background audio.
A real quick check of "top radio station owners" showed that the top ten all picked up more stations going from 2020 to 2021. Yes there are still a ton of small stations doing god knows what (on the order of 10,000 AM+FM commercial), but there's been a ton of consolidation. Your examples of Terry Gross and Kai Ryssdal kinda highlight that. Neither MPR nor WHYY are local for most of their audience (and arguably neither are focused on local content).
Give monthly donations to your local NPR affiliate. Most of them have decently middle-of-the-road biased news, and a few have really good music programming (looking at you, KUTX).
As someone who doesn't listen to the radio in FM or AM, does it really make sense to comment on your thoughts regarding how often and why it's listened to by most people? You're not one of them.
I've owned CDs since the early 90s. I e owned several good MP3 players. I have several USB drives with music on them.
I haven't touched any of those in about a decade, and instead listen to the radio every day.
Some time in the early 2000's I heard a Microsoft ad, on FM radio, for FAT32. I turned off the radio and basically never turned it on again (and made sure my next car had mp3 player support.)
Pirate radio stations are extremely rare in the US. They exist sure but, not so much that it's making the FM band not useful. The FCC really doesn't fuck around.
But, I think using the term "fully-owned" to refer to pushing up to GitHub, then deploying to Cloudflare Pages is definitely not "fully-owned"