Meet the something teaser thing

Well, I've wanted to get this blog out of the way for a long time, but the task has been shadowed by multiple rewrites Amanda has undergone as well as a plethora of bugs to be fixed or somehow mitigated and now that that's all done, I guess I can move on to the next thing and publicly tease what's next in the life of Amanda.

Earlier this week, I teased to the Amanda Discord guild that Amanda would be getting improvements and a fresh coat of paint in regards to radio stations. Currently, Amanda only supports Listen.moe and Frisky Radio, but that's it. Should a user have a URL to a raw media playback source for a radio station, then they could listen that way, but this approach is terrible for user experience and the user also misses out on discoverability. Of course, I can't support every radio station ever as frisky and listen.moe get their info via a websocket and the amount of ws connections that Amanda would have to create would be a nightmare to maintain as well as the fact that their APIs are more than likely to change at any point in time without notice.

As a matter of fact, Listen.moe was completely offline for the better half of a week and caused plenty of issues and I ended up disabling Frisky and Listen.moe as I didn't have time to debug exactly what was going on or why at the time. My solution doesn't really aim to somehow get track info for every station Amanda supports in the future, but more so allowing users to discover. I wanted to categorize radios stations and their sub stations by category so that the user can either go for a radio they're familiar with or branch out if they're feeling adventurous but still be able to stick to their tastes for the most part. Of course, this all isn't without issues.

Amanda needs your help

I don't get around too much myself nor do I know where to even look. I've paroused for some stations, but I've had issues trying to figure out how to stream the audio programatically or if the station was even desireable. Of course, it's not my place to determine desireability, but I would like to know what the users of Amanda listen to (if they're comfortable sharing it.) If you know any stations you'd like to see supported, please shoot me a message in either the Amanda Discord or in my Discord DMs (papiophidian)