State Media FM

Why. Your team throws off a constant stream of activity — issues, merge requests, deploys, chatter — and keeping an eye on it means living in dashboards. State Media FM turns that activity into a low-key internal radio station: calm focus music with the occasional spoken news bulletin, so you stay aware without staring at a screen.

What. It's a small app you run on your own machine. It reads your team's tools (GitHub / GitLab, Hacker News, and more), writes short news updates, reads them aloud, and plays them over generative background music in a browser tab. It's free and open-source (Apache-2.0), works offline, and phones nothing home.

How. You run one command; it starts a local web server and opens a browser tab. You point it at your sources — and, optionally, an AI gateway for richer news writing — right in the Settings tab. No config files to edit, and everything you set is remembered next time.

Run it

You need Python 3.12+ and git. Copy-paste:

git clone https://github.com/statemediafm/statemediafmradio.git
cd statemediafmradio
python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[all]"
statemediafm

That's it — your browser opens to http://127.0.0.1:8150. (If it doesn't open on its own, just visit that address.)

Set it going

1. Click ▶ Start — browsers stay silent until you click, so this begins the audio. It's already playing generative music with a Hacker News bulletin on a timer.
2. To add your own team's activity, open the Settings tab:

   • Auth — paste your GitLab (or GitHub) address and a read-only access token. Optionally add an AI gateway URL + key for smarter news writing.

   • News Update Sources — add your project's URL.

   • News writer — bulletins are written by an LLM, so you need one of:

     • the Claude CLI — run it on a machine with claude installed and signed in, and it writes the news using that login (no API key); or
     • an LLM gateway — have its base URL + API key ready to paste.

     Choose which under Settings › Auth › News writer.

3. Everything you change is saved automatically. Next time, just run statemediafm again and it all comes back.

To stop it, press Ctrl-C in the terminal.

Add your music (Spotify)

You can use your own Spotify account as the music mix, so bulletins play over your playlists instead of the generative bed (in-tab playback needs Spotify Premium). This takes a one-time setup: create a Spotify app to get a Client ID and Client Secret, with its redirect endpoint set to 127.0.0.1 (the same address the app runs on).

1. At developer.spotify.com, create an app and copy its Client ID and Client Secret. Set the redirect URI to http://127.0.0.1:8150/spotify/callback.
2. In Settings › Mix › Spotify, paste the Client ID and Secret (stored locally, never sent anywhere but your own machine).
3. In the Player tab, switch to Playlist mode, Connect Spotify, pick a playlist, and press ▶.

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Want the details — other install options, the command-line tools, how the music and news are generated, the local API, and the architecture? See TECHNICAL.md. For the trust model (what it protects, what stays on your machine, how tokens are stored), see SECURITY_MODEL.md.