addition of radio-browser.info?

[Tim Curtis]

Very disappointed to hear that.

The things you critisize are features that the stations themselves broadcast, we listeners have no say in those.

With almost 50 000 free web radio stations around the world now available, quality varies in all regards, that is a given.
But this service sure makes it easy to find and add to our favourites the stations we personally prefer.

If a user adds a new station to the radiobrowser worldwide database, he can only add a webpage favicon.
Radiobrowser is like the wiki for web radio stations, open source and free for all.

Here anyone can add a new/missing web radio station to the database:
https://www.radio-browser.info/add

Your statement "The things you critisize are features that the stations themselves broadcast, we listeners have no say in those." is completely bogus. You can get the high quality logo art and metadata right from the broadcasters Website in most cases. Thats primarily what's used to populate Moode's radio station feature. 

The fact these radio aggregators just scrape or store only low quality, incorrect or even missing metadata is not due to the broadcaster its the fault of the aggregator.

You may not care about quality logo art or accurate metadata but many others do including myself and thats the intended audience for our curated radio feature.

But as @the_bertrum mentioned a dev could volunteer their time and effort to create a new "radio browser" feature and propose that it be added to moode. If it's a good quality feature I'll work with the dev to test and refine it.

[Elias]

Hi everyone,  

I’m new to the moode community, currently testing Moode, and I’m absolutely thrilled. First of all, many thanks for this amazing project!  

Through another fantastic project, the ESP32 Mini Radio, I learned about the community-driven Radio Browser also mentioned here. In this project, the search for radio stations is directly integrated into the web browser interface on the ESP, allowing stations to be added as favorites with just one click, which results in the URL being stored locally. It's also possible to discover new stations by country or genre.

I was really hoping that the Community Radio Browser would already be integrated here as well, as the directory is incredibly comprehensive. So far, I did't miss a single station there. With the integration, moode would offer functionality similar to commercial internet radios, which typically have their own extensive built-in station lists.

That said, I can understand the challenge with missing meta data like the station images. But I have an idea for an integration to work around this issue: Moode already offers the option to add custom radio streams. In my opinion this would be the ideal place to integrate the Community Radio Browser. The challenging part usually is figuring out the streaming URL. With the integration users could search for a station and adopt the found station, which would result in the name and URL being pre-filled into the"Station name" and “Playable URL” field. This would be particularly beneficial for less tech-savvy users (and would definitely increase the WAF in my case  )

This idea would, of course, require quite a bit of time and programming effort, making it more of a long-term option. A short-term solution, and possibly an alternative to this, could be that users actively help to bring more stations into the moode repository. So my question also is, would it be possible for me to contribute stations that are popular in my region to the repository? If so, what steps would I need to take?

[Tim Curtis]

Some thoughts:

- Moode's curated radio station list is pretty nice out of the box but if you want to add your own stations it's as easy as clicking the + sign and filling out some fields. How much metadata you enter and the quality of the cover art is up to you.

- Then just Menu > Configure > System > Backup and create a backup that includes "Other stations" which are the stations that you manually added via +.

- If you want to include those stations on other moode players then do a restore and select only "Other stations".

As far as contributing stations to the curated list goes whats important is whether the station or collection of stations is truly unique and different from whats already provided. Very subjective of course.

[Elias]

Thanks Tim, for the quick feedback and the hints on the export and import functions!