A desktop-grade web player for the Art Bell radio archive — late-night talk radio about UFOs, the paranormal, and the unexplained, broadcasting from the high desert of Pahrump, Nevada.
Live at highdesert.space
- Windows 98 dark UI — raised/inset bevels, title bars, context menus, and a system tray
- Glassmorphism on mobile — frosted surfaces over an animated starfield
- Archive.org streaming — browse and play thousands of episodes directly
- Radio dial — tune through the archive on a frequency strip, with scanning and signal meter
- Community stats — play counts, ratings, a leaderboard, and a live listener count
- AI-enriched catalog — summaries, tags, categories and series detection, generated offline
- PWA / offline — installable, with a service worker and OPFS audio caching
- Oscilloscope visualizer — real-time Web Audio waveform in the player
- Keyboard navigation — Space, arrows, N/P, M, / for search, ? for shortcut help
- Ratings & tags — 5-star ratings with tag-based filtering
- Full-text search — instant search across titles, guests, and descriptions
- Offline-first — IndexedDB via Dexie with OPFS audio caching
- Deep links — share episodes via
?episode=ID
- Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19
- Tailwind CSS 4 with custom Win98 design tokens
- Dexie (IndexedDB) for client-side storage
- Zustand for player/UI state
- Web Audio API for the oscilloscope
- Postgres for community stats (self-hosted; the app runs fine without it)
git clone https://github.com/jacksongoode/High-Desert.git
cd High-Desert
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local # optional — see below
npm run devOpen http://localhost:3000.
| Variable | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
DATABASE_URL |
For community stats | Postgres connection string. Without it, /api/stats/* returns 503 |
DATABASE_URL is optional for development. Without it the player, library, radio, search and
offline features all work normally; only the community figures (play counts, ratings,
leaderboard, active listeners) show as empty.
There is no AI API key. Categorization runs offline via scripts/categorize-library.py, and its
output is committed to public/seed/library.json — nothing is sent to a third party at runtime.
npm run dev # Start dev server
npm run build # Production build
npm run start # Start production server
npm run lint # ESLint
npm run typecheck # tsc --noEmit
npm run test # Vitest