OndaCast's New Engine, a Rebuilt Player, and Captions for Everyone

Let's be real with each other for a minute. The last couple of weeks have been some of the craziest we've had since starting OndaCast.

If you were here, you probably noticed. Some pages loaded slowly or not at all. A station you loved sometimes wouldn't play. Podcasts went missing for a while. Your artist mixes disappeared and then came back. For some of you it happened in the middle of a show you were enjoying.

We're sorry. We mean that. You trust us with your morning commute, your late-night shows, your favorite podcasts and the stations from back home. When things break, we feel it too.

We want to tell you what we were doing, why it was worth it, and where we're going from here.

Why we rebuilt everything

OndaCast started out on Node.js and Next.js. That setup got us off the ground and helped us grow into a home for thousands of stations, podcasts and listeners all over the world. But as the community grew, so did the cracks. Pages got heavier, the servers worked harder than they should have, and every new feature took more effort to ship.

So we made a big decision. We moved the whole platform to a new foundation: Go on the backend and SvelteKit on the frontend.

Go now handles the heavy lifting: finding stations near you, loading podcast directories, importing new shows, serving your library. SvelteKit handles what you see and touch. It sends much less code to your browser and gets pages on screen faster. At the end of September we switched off the old Next.js server in production for good. Everything you use on OndaCast now runs on the new stack.

The honest part: it was messy

Moving a live site with this many stations, podcasts and listeners is a bit like changing the engine on a plane while it's flying. We planned carefully, tested a lot, and still hit turbulence.

When we cut over, some things didn't make the trip cleanly. Radio and podcast pages that wouldn't continue loading. Local station discovery that stopped showing what was near you. Podcast browsing and directory search that came up empty. Artist vibe mixes, shared mixes and song collections that went quiet. A few account playback workflows that tripped over themselves.

We didn't sleep much. Every one of those got tracked down and fixed, many of them within hours, and we put tests in place so they don't come back. If something still feels off to you, please tell us. Your reports have been a huge help this week.

A rebuilt player, now with captions

This is the part we're proudest of.

The player has been rebuilt from scratch, and it now has closed captions (CC). Tap the CC button and you'll see live captions for radio stations and podcast episodes as they play.

We built this because radio and podcasts should be for everyone. That includes people who are deaf or hard of hearing, listeners learning a new language, people in a quiet office or on a noisy train, and anyone who just wants to catch the name of that song the DJ mumbled.

Getting captions right on live radio is hard. A live stream doesn't come with a script, so the captions have to keep up in real time. We tried a few approaches and settled on the Moonshine speech engine, which turned out to be the most stable. We spent the last few days making sure the captions stay in sync, recover on their own when they drift, keep going when you jump around in a podcast, and stay on as you move around the site. You can also pick the caption language right from the player.

Other things the new player brings:

• A persistent video mini player that keeps playing while you browse

• Artist vibe mixes are back, and you can share them again

• Reusable song collections you can save and come back to

• A smoother Listen page with a cleaner queue that shows what's playing first

• Local stations sorted nearest first, so the station down the street shows up before the one three states away

• Faster podcast discovery: find a show and import it in one click

Faster and lighter

The new site loads quicker, uses less data on your phone, and puts less load on our servers. That last part matters more than it sounds. It means we can keep OndaCast free and growing without cutting corners, and spend our time building things for you instead of fighting fires.

You'll feel it most when you jump between stations, browse podcasts and open the player. Things just respond faster.

This is only the beginning

We didn't do all this to stand still. The new foundation lets us move faster and build things that weren't really possible before. We have a long list of ideas, and a lot of them came straight from you.

Our goal hasn't changed since day one: build the best radio and podcast community on the internet. That means a place where small local stations sit next to the big ones, where podcasters can find their audience, where anyone can listen whatever language they speak or however they hear, and where listeners feel at home.

Thank you

To everyone who kept listening through the bumpy days, who sent us bug reports, who told us when something broke, and who stuck with us anyway: thank you. This community is the reason OndaCast exists.

Keep the feedback coming. Tell us what you love, what drives you crazy and what you want next. We're listening, and we always will be.

See you on the dial. 📻

The OndaCast Team