Sixteen years ago, while I was a student, I built a Windows application for listening to internet radio stations. It ended up getting a surprisingly nice little community of users, but eventually life got in the way and I stopped working on it.

A few months ago I started thinking about it again. Partly out of nostalgia, and partly because I still couldn't find a radio player that I liked using.

So I decided to build it again from scratch, this time with the knowledge and experience I've accumulated over the last 16 years.

The result is nRadioBox: a web-based internet radio player with tens of thousands of stations. It is free, has no ads, doesn't require an account, and I deliberately don't track users.

The part I'm most interested in is not actually the player itself. There are plenty of good radio players already. I've been manually organizing stations into themed collections based on how I personally think people might want to listen to them — things like Blues Club, I Love 90s, Hard Rock Party, Balkan Vibes, Ex-YU Classics, Gym & Workout, etc.

I'm also experimenting with making radio discovery more interesting rather than just giving people a huge directory of stations.

Technically, the current version is built with Rust and React. The original project was a Windows application, so rebuilding it as a web application has been an interesting change of perspective for me.

There are still plenty of things I'm not sure about, especially how much people actually want to discover radio stations rather than just search for a particular station.

Anyway, this is the project:

https://nradiobox.com

I'd be interested in feedback, particularly from people who listen to internet radio: what would make you actually use something like this instead of the radio apps/services you already use?

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