Between 2004 and 2014, the Swedish government had a wonderful radio station called "SR Minnen", meaning "Swedish Radio Memories". It would constantly loop, without interruption, old, very interesting and, most importantly, extremely pleasant radio programmes from their vast archives, from the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, etc. I don't quite know how far back they went, but I constantly kept it running in the background while working. It was very cozy and the voices and the way everyone spoke were extremely pleasant to listen to.
Then they killed that channel. The actual, present-day SR is so vile that I literally want to stab my ears with sharp knives within one second of accidentally tuning in one of their stations. They also killed their "classical music" station a couple of years later.
Ever since, I've been hunting for pleasant radio stations. I've made countless searches online, but only find messy, crappy listings full of low-quality, ad-filled and weird stations.
I know about ASMR, but manually searching for new YouTube videos or Twitch streams which are tolerable (many of them contain nothing but "blablablabla" and "thank you for the subs/bits/giftsubs", etc.) is a far cry from just pressing a button on my keyboard at any moment to make my media player start playing a live radio station which is (almost) guaranteed to have something pleasant on.
I know about "The Classical Station", which plays classical music and sometimes have hosts speaking in a pleasant manner. However, the music they play is not always that pleasant, and while they don't have ads, they do have frequent "fund drives" where they ask for donations, which is almost the same thing in terms of annoyance.
I know about "RelaxingJazz". It's decent sometimes, and doesn't have ads, but it can sometimes drive me nuts with the kind of tunes it delivers. Also, a voice regularly goes: "Reeeeelaxxxing Jaaaazzz doooot cooom", which, as minor as it seems, does bother me, because I end up sitting and waiting for the next time it says it.
The few non-governmental, non-commercial stations left in Swedish are frankly trash and mostly just anger rather than relax me.
SR themselves refused to release their archive, so I cannot make my own localhost-hosted version of SR Minnen.
I have seen a few audio collections of radio from back in the day in English, but I don't think I've ever found an actual radio station that I can bookmark and listen to in my media player, where I don't have to go hunting on webpages and manually play clips. Also, if there is such a thing, it's almost certain to contain ads...
I hope my request and point comes across. I want to be able to just "tune in" and regularly be presented with something wonderful and interesting, and not have to go looking all over for things myself. Much like I used to be able to turn on the TV and find an interesting old movie playing on TCM, which I would never have manually hunted down and obtained from the Internet and then sat down and watched on my computer. While technically possible, it "just isn't done", if you know what I mean.
I'm particularly interested in radio stations which have an actual host, with a pleasant voice, rather than just somebody having put a ton of random files on a server somewhere. (Although even the latter would be nice at this point.)
Hosts who pleasantly ask for donations live are OK, but stations with actual commercials and frequent pre-recorded, elaborate "jingles"... they just kill my soul. I don't understand how anyone can tolerate those without going daffy.
I don't have a specific genre that I need. Any kind of music, talking or just abstract sounds which sounds good is what I'm looking for. I'm a huge fan of high-quality, pleasant sounds, but it's surprisingly difficult to find such things these days. Even things which claim to be "relaxing" often stress me out due to the reasons I've mentioned or implied above.