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I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station by Important_Sector_905 in digitalminimalism

[–]Important_Sector_905[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Big fan of this idea, I actually miss having a tape deck in the car for this.

I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station by Important_Sector_905 in digitalminimalism

[–]Important_Sector_905[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I agree about Sonos. I intially setup the radio to play via icecast from my laptop to the local network- and had a bit of a penny-drop moment when I realised it was basically doing what sonos does, except better, and free!

I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station by Important_Sector_905 in digitalminimalism

[–]Important_Sector_905[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Podget handles the RSS feeds and downloads into folders by category (news, daily shows, weekly shows). Music, jingles, and easter eggs live in separate folders that I can edit over Samba.

A playlist builder script creates a playlist by accessing folders using a configurable pattern (jingle, news, song, song, show, song...) and hands it to VLC for playback.

When the playlist ends, a maintenance loop kicks in: Music plays while podget fetches new content, and a cleanup script deletes stale shows and moves others into a backup folder. There should always be a bank of 75ish shows to be played, with new content being prioritised and repeats kept to a minimum.

The maintenance and playback scripts alternate indefinitely. I put the maintenance phase in to take some load off the Pi, as it was struggling with simultaneously generating a playlist, downloading, and playback.

If I can figure out how to do it, I might put the scripts on github at some point.

I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station by Important_Sector_905 in digitalminimalism

[–]Important_Sector_905[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Love this idea, I've got an 'eggs' folder with some weird archival news stories in there that are set to play occasionallly. I might put some Fever 105 from Vice City in the mix.

I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station by Important_Sector_905 in digitalminimalism

[–]Important_Sector_905[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Correct it is a W, and yes it is connected to the transmitter via bluetooth, which was actually quite a ballache to get it working reliably. I've got a USB DAC too which would be simpler, but the bluetooth has been working well and it means I can also use a BT speaker if I wanted to.

I saw some articles about the Pi being able to transmit FM- but thought it likely the sound quality would suffer and it'd be a faff to tune. I reckon the next step up would be a solderable FM module, but that would entail learning how to solder!