SomaFM (opens in new tab)

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!

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!

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/

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/

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

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!

A lot has changed over the past 20 years but playing 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I created 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).

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.

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.

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/ab96a596c16371e3968b7eea48...

Hope it helps with your #life-hacking

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.

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.

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.

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.

see also: https://poolsuite.net

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`

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.

This and Digitally Imported has gotten me through a lot

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.

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 :).

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/

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

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.

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

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

Personally I love 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?

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/

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.

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.

This page from the Wayback Machine brings back so many memories from MusicforHackers.com:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010402042427/http://musicforha...

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.

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

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

PopTron was my favorite station for years, many good memories there.

Give them a chance if you haven't yet.

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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

Definitely one of the gems of what we now call the indie-web.

I envy Rusty his attention span.

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.

I still remember and miss http://bluemars.org/

I discovered so much beautiful ambient music back in the early/mid 2000s.

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

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?

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.

big thank you to somafm!!

sidetracking a little here but a good one for idm is https://verdure.net/

Groove Salad For Lyfe

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

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

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

https://worldwidefm.net is worth a listen

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

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

Discovered this for myself the other week. I love it!

More epic and amazing project and sites like this, please.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Underground 80s has been my favourite station for years.

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

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

Listening to it now, and I did donate :)

Wow, no mention of chromanova.de yet?

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

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

soma is awesome indeed. long time listener

Groove salad!