Questions

Everything below is the actual answer rather than the flattering one. If something here is wrong or missing, it's an oversight and not a policy.

Is it really free?

Yes, and permanently. There's no account, no trial and no tier above this one. Running it costs a small amount each month, which I pay, which is the entire business model — there isn't one.

What does it actually sound like?

Ambient, mostly — slow, textural, low on percussion, the kind of thing that sits behind a working day. The difference from every other ambient stream is that these tracks have vocals, and the lyrics are about working in software: shipping, being on call, the outage, the rewrite.

If you want the sound without the words, this isn't the station for that, and there are good instrumental ones. The words are the point.

Is the music AI-generated?

Yes. Every track is generated. I don't write the lyrics and I'm not going to claim I do. What I do is decide what each song should be about and then discard most of what comes back. The about page has the full version, including what that means for who owns any of it.

Won't lyrics wreck my concentration?

Possibly. It depends on you, and I'd rather give you the real picture than sell you something the evidence doesn't support.

The lab research is fairly consistent and not flattering to this station: for verbal work — and reading code is verbal work — silence tends to beat instrumental music, and instrumental beats music with words. If you're holding a subtle bug in your head, turn it off.

Two things complicate that. The penalty is much smaller for people who habitually work with music on than for people who don't; in a 2024 study the effect on habitual listeners was close to nil. And the one long-run field study of actual software developers — Lesiuk, 2005, following fifty-six of them over five weeks — found their lowest work quality and their slowest time-on-task in the weeks music was taken away.

So Idlewave isn't a focus tool and isn't sold as one. It's company. Those are different products, and only one of them owes you a controlled trial.

Can I pause it? Can I skip a song?

Neither, and that's deliberate. It's a broadcast rather than a file, so there's no "where you left off" to come back to — everyone tuned in is hearing the same second of the same song. Leave and return in twenty minutes and you get whatever is on now, the same as any radio.

Why does muting disconnect the stream?

Because a mute that only drops the volume to zero carries on downloading the audio regardless. Idlewave's mute closes the connection outright, so nothing is transferred while you aren't listening — better for your bandwidth and mine. The trade is that unmuting takes a moment to reconnect, and rejoins the broadcast live.

Can I listen outside the browser?

Yes. It's a plain Icecast MP3 mount, so anything that plays internet radio will take it — VLC, foobar2000, Winamp, mpv, a networked speaker.

• idlewave.pls — for most desktop players
• idlewave.m3u — if your player prefers M3U

Or open the stream URL directly: https://stream.idlewave.dev/idlewave

What's the audio quality?

128 kbps MP3, 44.1 kHz, stereo. That's a deliberate middle — good enough not to sound thin on real headphones, small enough to leave running for a working day. It works out to roughly 58 MB an hour, which is nothing on wifi and worth knowing about on a metered connection.

What's playing right now?

The player shows the current track while you're tuned in. There's no history page or track archive yet.

Are there ads?

None on this site or on the stream you get from it, and none planned. I'm scoping that claim deliberately: if the broadcast is ever simulcast to YouTube, YouTube runs its own advertising against it and that isn't mine to switch off. Here, there's nothing.

Do you track me?

No cookies, and nothing that follows you to other sites. Your browser keeps two values locally — your volume, and whether the stream was on when you last left — and neither leaves your machine.

The streaming server counts how many connections are open, which is where the listener number in the player comes from. That's a count, not an identity.

Can I use these songs in a video or a game?

I can't give you permission, because I have none to give — I hold no copyright in these recordings. I also can't promise you that nobody else has a claim: the law around AI-generated audio is unsettled and actively being litigated right now.

So the honest answer is that I'm not going to stop you, and I'm also not a safe legal footing to build on. If there's money involved, ask a lawyer rather than a radio station.

Who makes this?

It's a side project, run by one person, for people doing the same kind of work. More on the about page.