everyone uses spotify these days. me too. but spotify makes you the boss of your music. you can skip, go back, pick any song, shuffle, whatever. sounds great right? but actually, being the boss of your music makes you forget how special it is.
too much control
think about vinyl. you put a record on, you listen to the whole thing. start to finish. no skipping. no shuffling. you’re not the boss, the record is. and somehow that makes it better.
or think about a walkman. can listening to music on a walkman and listening on spotify feel the same? i don’t think so. something is different, and i think that something is control. on a walkman, you’re not the boss. and that’s why it’s special.
i love listening to the radio. always did. but in turkey right now, there’s nothing good on the radio. maybe trt nagme if you’re into turkish classical music, but that’s it. nothing else for me.
the idea
one day i was driving and i wanted music but i didn’t want to choose. i didn’t want to pick an album, i didn’t want to scroll through playlists. i wanted someone else to be the boss, i mean i wanted radio. but a radio that plays the music i actually like.
that radio doesn’t exist. so i built it.
for copyright reasons, i can’t share a full demo but this one can give you an idea.
how it works
i made an app using flutter and node.js. you give it a yt music playlist link and that’s it. that’s your only input. then:
- yt-dlp fetches the songs.
- claude generates a live transcript for the radio host. if i run out of credits, it falls back to deepseek automatically. no interruption. the transcript is not just a plain text. it has things like
[laughs],[coughs],[sighs],[excited]etc. in brackets. - then elevenlabs v3 turns this into speech. and the voice sounds insanely real thanks to their new emotional model.
- radio starts and keeps going until i stop it.
i can’t skip songs. i can’t go forward or back. i can’t see what’s next. the host decides, not me. i’m not the boss anymore. the radio is.
what the host does
they introduce themselves at the beginning. before every song they talk about it, gives trivia, fun facts about the artist, recording studio, etc. sometimes they share news. two options i can choose when i’m setting it up: either real news scraped live from the internet or ai-generated random news (i can choose a year and they generate news from that year, useful to make it feel like a retro radio). sometimes they tell the weather. on the hour they say stuff like “it’s 8 o’clock”. you know, exactly like a real radio host.
why i love it
because i gave up control. no skip button, no progress bar, no queue, no “up next.” i just listen. and i forgot how good that feels.
sometimes the host talks too long and i’m like “come on man, play the song.” but that’s exactly what happens on real radio too :) this is what makes the songs feel special.
it brought back that feeling. the analog feeling. not being the boss is sometimes exactly what you need. and i think this is what we lost today in the digital age. we have all the control, but we lost the joy.
maybe i’ll share my thoughts on this in another post.
the end
i’m not the boss anymore. and honestly? i don’t want to be.