I love college radio stations but couldn't find a decent way to listen to them while I work, so I made this map. If all you're looking for is a quick start, right-click a station to listen to it, or left click it to get lots of info about it.

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

Everything is plotted live from a database, and the idea is its human filtered, so it's just the good stuff unlike the automated chaos of itunes or shoutcast.com. Everything's still experimental but evolving whenever I use this to procrastinate doing actual work. Some coolio features:

• As I said, most of the stations are plotted using actual GPS coordinates of the transmitter tower as listed in the FCC database (via radio-locator.com). When looking at a station's popup, click the "zoom in" icon to zoom in really close and you can often see the transmitter antenna... Check out CJUM up in Canada for example. I still haven't figured out where to plot the internet-only streams that don't give any indication where they're from. The North Pole maybe? Or does anyone know of a good way to resolve an IP address to an exact physical address?
• Click a station's icon to get a popup with more info including station phone number, homepage, schedule, currently playing song, webcam if available, IM if available, direct link to shoutcast stream, coverage map if available, etc. Or right click the tower icon (not the text label) to start the stream without opening the popup.
• You can zoom in/out using the mouse wheel, by double left/single right clicking the map, using the +/- keys on your keyboard, or map controller on the left.
• If a stream is down or there's some problem with a station, click the "flag" icon in its popup window. Every night my robot tests all the stations and generates a report, so hopefully things stay reasonably up to date.
• You can suggest a new radio station here.
• Click the dice for a random station.
• I only just started (Jan '08) adding the internet streams and NPR-ish streams so be patient with those.
• You can show/hide stations of various categories (college, community, pirate, etc) using the checkboxes in the box to the right of the map.
• Click the "turn declutter on/off" to hide some stations to reduce clutter. So far this only applies to the college stations since (hallelujia) there's so damn many of them.
• You can make the map go fullscreen by adding "?fullscreen=yes" to the URL like this. Looks great on a giganto widescreen monitor when you put your browser into fullscreen mode, especially if you're using something like the Fullerscreen Firefox extension or better yet, Opera.
• If you're using iTunes you might consider using the "compact mode", which'll prevent iTunes from jumping to the foreground every time you click a station.
• If you're using Firefox and are annoyed by the "download" window that pops up, just leave it minimized. Or you can disable it in Firefox preferences.
• After clicking a station you should see a "now playing" link on the sidebar. Clicking the call letters will zoom in on the station on the map.
• Click the icon in the center of the Google Maps pan/zoom thingus on the left to reset map position. And click anywhere on the map to close the station popup windows.
• You can access this site through a bunch of domain names, all pointing the same place: damngoodradio.com, radiogizmo.org and fuckcommercialradio.org.
• I put together a fledging API so other applications can use the database. If you want access to the database in raw form, let me know. If all you need is an XML file, try this (in format google maps expects) or this (the format I use for Radioactive). Or link to individual streams like this or this, play a random stream like this or this, get a playlist of all the stations like this or this. If you need some new feature, like a way to query the database from your app for something other than a PLS file, let me know. And if you make anything that uses this db, please let me know since I'd like to use it too.
• If you're trying to play a station from PocketTunes on your Palm or some other program that makes you type in a URL, here's an example of a quick way to do it: radiogizmo.org/wfmu. All the stations in the db are accessible like that.
• Feel free to let me know how this works on your system, as I'm pretty new to google maps and am definitely not the biggest javascript guy.

wrybread@gmail.com

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