If it is for the "Play" button, then it should be better named as "mute"
or maybe "Squelch" and being processed with reverse logic:
If pressed it should either reduce the audio volume by 20 dB (audio
level), or maybe even totally mute the sound.
Or, maybe you want to implement something like "Squelch" - depending on
RF signal level for example - then you could use it to switch on or off
the muting of hissing sounds, while not receiving enough RF level for
decoding the FM signal without background noise.
Maybe it could be even used to swith on/ off in different levels, so it
* only would produce audio output on really strong RF levels with
good signal quality, where the audio signal would be almost completely
without any hiss.
* Next level would be switching on for stations that can provide
bearable stereo sound with some light hissing but producing mono sound
almost without hissing.
* And the next level then would be "always on" for audio output, so
even the FM hissing sound will be presented.
But what I'm totally missing at that GUI is something to indicate and
switch on/ off Stereo decoding! Weak stations or bad receiption
situations may still work well, if you only have Mono, but then lead to
ugly hissing, when trying to process the signal in stereo.
Also for some persons the TS (traffic service)/ TA (traffic
announcement) Flags are important, that are indicated by some additional
pilot tone while in the audio (baseband) spectrum. Thinking for example
of some car radio being equiped with your receiver.
One could also think of some colour change for the display, either for
signal quality, or (as it was used in vintage car stereo systems from
"Blaupunkt") for indication of the traffic-service/ traffic-announcement
- one colour for standard service, another one for traffic service/
announcement....
There were lots of good and innovative things already, when you look at
old radio receivers (who would not love to have the "magic eye tube"
display to show signal strength...?) ;-)
Best regards,
Wolfgang
Am 05.06.25 um 15:54 schrieb Marcus Müller:
Hi Hamza,
love it! Would leave out the song cover display, to be honest –
showing the textual RDS info is enough for almost all users, and you'd
need not care about fetching covers. And I don't know where you'd be
getting station logos from; to the best of my logo, RDS doesn't
transmit logos.
As such, I think your channel list might be relying too heavily on the
station icons being visually distinguishing elements! And these icons
don't exist in the radio transmission!
I'd rather have a larger (RDS terminology) *Programme Service Name*
being displayed (it can only be 8 characters long!) or *Long Programme
Service Name* (LPS, when available, <=32 UTF-8 characters), with the
frequency found displayed below in a smaller font, and maybe the
*Programme Type* (PTY) and *Programme Type Name* (PTYN) when
available. I think keeping space for a (later) signal strength
indicator would be cool, too.
Something like:
___ ___ ___ ____ _ ___ _ _ _ _ ___ _
_ _
| _ ) _ )/ __|__ (_) | __(_)__| |_(_)___ _ _ __ _| | / __| |_ __ _|
|_(_)___ _ _
| _ \ _ \ (__ / / _ | _|| / _| _| / _ \ ' \/ _` | | \__ \ _/ _` |
_| / _ \ ' \
|___/___/\___|/_/ (_) |_| |_\__|\__|_\___/_||_\__,_|_|
|___/\__\__,_|\__|_\___/_||_|
🯱 🯰 🯰 .🯰 🯰 MHz 📶███████▒░░░ Education / Bringing you the
coolest fiction!
(of course, not as ASCII-art, but I didn't have my graphics editor
handy.)
I'm not sure what a "play" (▶) / next (⏵|)/ previous (|⏴) button does
in a radio receiver? If you mean "jump to next/previous found
station", then please use vertically pointing arrows instead of left
and right – your station list is vertical, too!
(I'm still not sure what the "play" button does in a radio receiver –
it's not a cassette player!)
I don't specifically like the spotify UI (my media player software is
kind of the opposite of spotify in so many ways), so I'm not very
qualified to critique the overall design. But: you have a lot of space
around your channel list and waterfall display, so I'd suggest you
make the buttons beneath as large and easy to hit for even someone
shortsighted as possible, and make the volume slider have a large,
easy to see "handle": I really think that the common loudness sliders
where the user needs to know that they can drag the end, without the
end actually having a visible "knob" is a design mistake, as I've seen
*multiple* people fail to try doing that, because common UX
expectation is that things your can interact with are somewhat "button
shaped".
The "heart" icon seems to be "blindly stolen" from spotify and cannot
serve a purpose on a radio receiver, so I'd strongly recommend
removing it.
Best regards,
Marcus
On 6/4/25 10:20 PM, Hamza Mohammed wrote:
Hi everyone! As part of my GSoC project, I’ve been working on an FM
radio app, and I just finished the first layout draft—would love your
thoughts!
Main features:
*
*Debug view*: FM receiver controls like sampling rate, filter
size, squelch, gain
(still working on this part)
*
*Home page*: Auto SDR detection, frequency scanning, channel
listing, multi-stream
recording with RDS (station info, song titles, etc.)
*
*On-demand flowgraph control* for better performance
The UI is kinda Spotify-inspired. I’ve attached sketches and Figma
mockups—let me know if it’s missing something, looks off, or just
feels boring. First time designing an app, so all feedback is welcome!
