You can go ahead and start listening to Code Radio while you read this

Most developers I know listen to music while they code. When the meetings are over, the headphones come out.

And devs aren’t alone. According to a study Spotify conducted in 2014, 61% of people listen to music while they work — mostly to stay focused, and to drown out surrounding noise.

So in 2018, freeCodeCamp.org created a music live stream on our YouTube channel called Code Radio.

And now we've gone a step further: we've moved Code Radio off of YouTube and onto our own fast, data-efficient internet radio station.

Choosing the tunes

We made a couple critical decisions early on:

  1. There would be no advertisements. This wasn’t a hard decision, since we don’t have ads anywhere on freeCodeCamp.org or our YouTube channel, anyway.
  2. The genre would be instrumental downtempo music, which is relaxing and non-distracting. My grad school classmates and I had listened to thousands of hours of this type of music while studying and hadn’t gotten bored of it yet. So it seemed like a safe bet for a coding live stream as well.

Fortunately, I knew a prolific musician in the freeCodeCamp community.

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Lawrence hanging out in LA (photo by Leah Perrino)

Lawrence Yeo — also known as Trebles and Blues — is a DJ and music producer in Los Angeles. His work encompasses many genres: American soul, jazz, Brazilian funk, and even Korean folk music. The common root that connects all these influences together is hip hop — blending percussive elements and sampling techniques to create a wide variety of instrumental works.

In addition to his work as a musician, Lawrence enjoys programming. Among other things, he built his own website for his music.

Lawrence hand-curated Code Radio's more than 1,250 songs.

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Lawrence working on some new grooves (Photo by Joannza Lo)

Making Code Radio fast and accessible

Now you can listen to Code Radio on your phone. It is now extremely data-efficient. The website itself loads fast, and the music starts playing almost immediately.

If you open Code Radio on your phone, you can switch between apps and the music will keep playing. You can even lock your phone and continue listening, and have the ability to stop and start the music from your headphones or lock screen.

And if your phone has limited data, you can kick the bitrate down to 64kbps to cut Code Radio's data usage in half.

Be sure to bookmark Code Radio and come back. We'll continue to expand and refine the playlist, and add additional features. You can tweet about Code Radio using the #CodeRadio hashtag.

Enjoy the tunes, and happy coding!