More info about installed skills (Mycroft Radio specifically)

I wanted to know where can I find more info about Mycroft Radio.
Basically I want to know what all stations are available. I can see links to radios at https://www.radio-browser.info/ but I don’t think all these stations are available, Or are they?

From what I can tell, for the Radio skill, you can request music from any one of these tags, https://www.radio-browser.info/tags. Where the tags are the genres.

The skill seems to only support: play [genre]

Where play [station] or play [artist] rarely works form me. And getting a list of stations and/or artists that work will require playing around with the radio-browser.info API.

The GitHub repo for the Radio Skill explains as much:

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That makes sense.
I kept trying to play [station], tags definitely don’t include all stations listed as far as I can see.
Hopefully there is an update for playing particular station, I’m not sure if artist can be supported in same way but that would be good as well.

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Hey there, thanks for starting the conversation on this. I think there’s a lot of potential for this Skill to improve.

I’ve bumped it over to the feature request category so that others can vote it up if they want it prioritized.

A small clarification the version running on the Mark II is here:

There are a few ways that the Skill reduces the list of stations. Stations found to be bad should get skipped automatically (:crossed_fingers:), and recently we added in a simple language filter. By default it will only return English language stations, but this can be changed in your Skill settings either to a different language, or to have no preference.

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I have also found that “Play radio [city]” works pretty consistently, creating a genre from the city tag. There is then a list of from one to several stations that can be scrolled through using the “next/last” buttons (look like |< or >| ). I have no idea how it decides the number of stations or who makes the cut, but I’m guessing there’s a cutoff threshold for “clicks”

A good feature to add, as a work around for STT parsing of station names, would be to allow presets (eg., “Mycroft play radio preset [#]”) You could set up the presets in the skill configuration, where you attach the “name” field from the desired station as listed on radio-browser.info to your preset number.

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Either my Mark II doesn’t support Play radio [city] or there are specific cities supported by it.
Tried few cities and they didn’t work

Possibly I jumped to a conclusion with n=3. Nashville and Austin both worked, then I tried Charleston, and when that worked, I figured it was a general thing. Maybe check those out on yours just to see if it’s a version thing or something?

radio Austin worked so I guess selective cities.

I tried “radio ga ga” (trying to play off a queen album).
Didn’t work, understandably :smile:

Maybe another work around would be to add a unique (fictional?) city tag to a station of interest (that doesn’t already have one), and upvote it until it appears when you request radio from that city :rofl: I guess you could do that with genre too, but I imagine most stations are already given a genre.

can confirm - bunch of stations it wont find

I manually went through the genres / categories / “channels” (a particularly problematic word to describe this – how about let’s change this) I was getting and wrote them down, and here’s what I got. A couple I’m not sure of I marked with a “?”.

  • Jazz
  • Dance
  • Musica
  • Oldis
  • 80s
  • Top 40
  • Electronica (?)
  • Pop
  • News
  • Classical
  • Talk
  • Funk (?)
  • Country
  • House
  • Estacion
  • Public
  • FM
  • Christmas
  • Radio drama
  • News
  • Mexican Rock(?)
  • Classical
  • Entreteminiento
  • Hits
  • Classic Rock
  • Mexico
  • Moi Merino
  • Folk
  • Adult Contemporary (?)
  • Musica Espanol
  • Local News
  • Country
  • Community
  • Latinamerica
  • Alternative
  • Classic Hits
  • House
  • Epañol
  • Greek
  • Pop Rock
  • Musica Pop
  • Regional Mexico
  • Musica
  • 70s
  • Christian
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