radio

Lightyear.fm Shows How Deep into Space Our Songs Have Traveled
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Lightyear.fm Shows How Deep into Space Our Songs Have Traveled

Jeff Gamet · · 1 Comment

Let’s say you could travel 50 light years from Earth, or maybe 100. What would you hear? That’s exactly what Lightyear.fm shows us, and it’s eerily awesome. The site’s developers used more than 120 years of data from Billboard to simulate the radio transmissions we’d hear—assuming the inverse square law of propagation didn’t exist, of course. What they came up with is akin to taking an FM radio on the Starship Enterprise and warping away from Earth. Listening to more recent songs is cool, but I loved the surreal sensation of feeling like I’m 100 light years from Earth catching hollow sounding early radio transmissions.

Editorial

Apple, Let Us Tune into Those FM Radio Channels

Jeff Butts · · 5 Comments

Your iPhone has an FM radio chip that you’ve never been able to use. FCC chairman Ajit Pai thinks that’s a shame, and so does Jeff Butts. While the FCC chairman isn’t going to try forcing Cupertino to turn on the chip, he’s certainly turning up the heat about it. Let’s see what the good chairman has to say, and what impact that might have on streaming music services.