Ask HN: GIS, Audio Mashup Ideas?

3 points by ThoroughlyR 13 years ago | 6 comments

I'm looking for a neat side project idea, preferably something to do with geolocation and audio. I had an idea of showing a graph with people in your area that are listening to the same radio channel as you are, but Pandora doesn't have an open API and I'm too cheap to pay for IHeartRadio.

Any ideas?

gadders 13 years ago |

Something that immediately springs to mind would be guided tours. EG walking round, say, Pompeii/Arlington Cemetery/The Pyramids and having audio notes/lectures appear on the spot you are standing at.

Maybe a framework that lets people implement that as a service/app for their particular site?

jcr 13 years ago |

If you're interested in location and music, you should talk to Joey Flores of EarBits.com fame (YC funded). A concept might be shows or events happening soon in your general location, and a taste of the music from the given musicians.

ThoroughlyR 13 years ago | |

Something like Eventful, but solely for music?

lsiebert 13 years ago |

just spitballing here? How about mashing up NPR story locations, so people can see recent NPR stories about events in their area?

alternatively, if you can find an accurate source of data on where FM and AM radio reach, and genre's they play, you could do a mashup with mapping software, so people going on long trips can put in types of music they like and know when and what to switch the radio to.

or create some sort of plugin for shoutcast that allows shoutcast broadcasters to have a map of where their listeners are and interesting related geo analytics.

ThoroughlyR 13 years ago | |

The FCC keeps information on radio stations, but it doesn't include anything on the station's genre. This could probably be fixed with a classifier that learns based on the station's website.

I've never heard of Shoutcast, I'll have to check it out.

EDIT: SHOUTcast's API doesn't seem to support anything that would allow a show host to gather info on users. That's probably for the best though ..

lsiebert 13 years ago | | |

I'm pretty sure that shoutcast stations run their own shoutcast sever, and presumably you get IP addresses, and could then plug them into a IP Geolocation API. If you built an app or plugin for the shoutcast broadcaster, they could know where their listeners were. Now, if you wanted to gather info on other people's servers, that could be problematic, though I suppose, once you built an app for an individual hosting a server, you could have it send the geographical info without IP addresses for analysis purposes and maybe a leaderboard. "You are the 4th most popular dubstep station in Peoria, IL!" Hmm and even anonymous data on that level could potentially have monetization opportunities.

Edit: and you can look at the Yes.com API. http://www.programmableweb.com/api/yes-broadcast-db