The Taylorator Puts Swift's Songs on Every FM Channel at Once — Thanks to a LimeSDR
"Is this legal? I think the answer is… probably not," the Taylorator's creator admits.
Software developer Stephen D. has decided to convert nearby radio listeners into Swifties, by force of signal spamming — using a software-defined radio device to flood the FM band with 100 of Taylor Swift's finest songs played simultaneously.
"For the past two weeks or so, I've been working on constructing the Taylorator. The Taylorator is a piece of software which allows me to flood the FM broadcast band with Taylor Swift's music. No matter where you tune your radio, you will only be able to listen to her," Stephen explains of the project. "Okay, I admit that you could technically use the Taylorator to broadcast whatever music you want, so maybe it's a bit of a misnomer. But for some reason I figured this would be funnier."
The Taylorator is designed to override nearby FM receivers to pick up a transmission from Stephen's computer, connected to a LimeSDR USB software defined radio dongle — but rather than targeting a single FM frequency, it attempts to cover the entire usable band. "This […] works out to 100 different frequencies that we need to populate (with 100 different songs)," Stephen explains. "So, how can we accomplish this?"
Stephen's software holds the secret: fed a directory filled with Swift songs, pre-processed to matching frequency rates and tailored for FM transmission, the Rust-based project targets every odd-numbered FM frequency and assigns one song to each — meaning nearby receivers will hear nothing but Swift. Running on a laptop with Intel 10th-generation i5 processor, that's a tall order: "I can only get to about 0.5× real-time performance if I target the entire FM broadcast band (88-108MHz)," Stephen admits. "However, if I decrease that slightly to 88-104MHz, then my laptop is able to handle it at slightly better than real-time." A more powerful desktop, based on an AMD Ryzen 2700X, pushes the performance to 2× real-time even targeting the whole band, the developer notes.
"Whenever I told someone about the Taylorator during its development, the question I'd consistently get asked is, 'is this legal?' This is going to depend on exactly where you live and exactly how you're using the Taylorator, but in general, I think the answer is… probably not," Stephen admits. "There are generally cut-outs for very low power FM transmitters, like the ones people use in their car. Usually, though, this requires the transmitter itself to be licensed, and of course, the software I have written has no such license."
The project is written up on Stephen's website, with source code on a GitLab repository under the permissive MIT license.
