Adblock Radio Buffer

Listen to the radio ad-free and without interruptions. Adblock Radio Buffer buffers radio content and lets you fast-forward ads.

Uses Adblock Radio as a backend, featuring machine-learning and acoustic fingerprinting techniques.

A technical discussion describes how it works.

Preview

Player interface

For each radio, metadata is retrieved with the open source live metadata scraper.

A colored bar indicates how much of audio is available. Default setting is to buffer up to 15 minutes. Each color tells the user about the content of the audio:

• blue for music
• green for talk
• red for ads

Select the content you want to hear

You can choose what kind of content you want to hear or skip on each radio.

On news stations, it is great just to skip ads. On musical stations, it's convenient to skip ads and also talk interruptions.

Many radios available, more to come

At the time of writing, 84 radios are available in the player.

It is planned to add more. You can submit requests here.

Crowd-sourced improvements of the filters

Sometimes the predictor is wrong. Not a problem, it is possible to report mispredictions.

It makes Adblock Radio better for everybody.

Installation

Docker (recommended for most users)

Choose a directory where configuration and log files will be stored.

mkdir /var/lib/adblockradio
mkdir /var/lib/adblockradio/config
mkdir /var/lib/adblockradio/log

Built images are available on Docker Hub as adblockradio/buffer. Check on https://hub.docker.com/r/adblockradio/buffer.

Find the version you want to run, e.g. 0.1.0.

VERSION=0.1.0
docker pull adblockradio/buffer:$VERSION
cd /var/lib/adblockradio
docker run -it -p 9820:9820 -a STDOUT --mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/config,target=/usr/src/adblockradio-buffer/config --mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/log,target=/usr/src/adblockradio-buffer/log adblockradio/buffer:$VERSION

The interface should now be available at http://localhost:9820/. Type Ctrl-P Ctrl-Q to detach from the container.

To make it accessible to remote clients, configure e.g. Nginx the following way:

server {
        server_name subdomain.your-server.com;
        root /usr/share/nginx/html;

        location / {
                proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header   Host      $http_host;
                proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:9820;
                proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Proto https;
        }
        listen 80;
}

and use Certbot to enable HTTPS. You are good to go.

Advanced users and developers can build their own Docker image with docker-build.sh.

Desktop binary (Linux only, alpha quality)

An Electron Linux binary is available here. It has been tested on Debian 8.0/LMDE2 x64. It needs ffmpeg on your system. If you do not have it, run sudo apt install ffmpeg.

Windows and Mac builds are expected in the future.

From source

Installation instructions expect a minimum of technical knowledge.

Create an empty directory somewhere on your machine, we call it DIR.

First, install Adblock Radio algorithm. You should now have DIR/adblockradio with the files inside. In that subdirectory, run node demo.js to check everything is working correctly.

Then, install this player. Run these commands in DIR, so that DIR/buffer will be created:

git clone https://github.com/adblockradio/buffer.git
cd buffer
npm install
cd client
npm install
npm run build
cd ..

Interface in browser

npm run start

Open http://localhost:9820 in your favorite browser. Add your radios and enjoy!

Interface in Electron (native desktop app)

cd node_modules/adblockradio
npm rebuild zeromq --runtime=electron --target=3.1.7 --update-binary
cd ../..
npm run electron

Add your radios and enjoy!

Development

In a first terminal, open React dev server:

cd client
npm start

Interface in browser

In another terminal, run the backend:

npm run startdev

Open http://localhost:9820 in your favorite browser.

Interface in Electron (native desktop app)

In another terminal, run the backend:

npm run electrondev

Roadmap

• Nicer UI and UX (help would be appreciated)
• Cross platform Electron builds
• Docker builds (WIP)
• Cordova apps (WIP), or even better React native apps

Contributions welcome.

Copyright

Copyright 2018-2019, Alexandre Storelli