Trimbitas

The name

Not a trumpet. A horn made of wood.

A trâmbiță is the Romanian alphorn — a straight wooden horn, a metre and a half to over three, built up from staves of fir, hazel or lime and bound along its length. It is played across the Carpathians: in Maramureș, in Oaș, in Bucovina, in the Apuseni. Some valleys call it bucium, others tulnic.

The word travelled to get there. It begins in old Germanic trumba, to trumpet, and reaches the north by way of Slavic trambica.

Length

1.5 to 3+ metres

Built from

Staves of fir, hazel or lime

Also called

Bucium, tulnic

Played in

Maramureș · Oaș · Bucovina · Apuseni

Why this name

A signal, carried across a valley.

Shepherds sound it to call the flock in at dusk and out again at dawn. It is not really a musical instrument, or not only one. It is a way of reaching something too far off to shout at.

Its entire purpose is carrying a signal across a valley — which is what a radio transmitter does, made of wood.

And the app is not named for the horn. Trâmbițaș names the person who sounds it: the horn-blower, the herald, the one who carries the message rather than the thing the message travels down. It also happens to be the surname of the person who built this.

The app

Built to replace one that was abandoned.

After a decade of use, the radio app this replaces stopped being maintained and eventually stopped working — taking a library of stations with it. That is the thing this is built not to do. Your favourites are yours, and you can export them and walk away at any time.

• Over 50,000 stations from the community-maintained Radio Browser directory.
• No account, no advertising, no analytics, no tracking of any kind.
• Nothing you listen to is reported anywhere, because there is nowhere to report it to.
• Paste a stream URL and it becomes yours. Playlist files are resolved for you.
• A sleep timer that fades rather than stopping dead, because it is used at night.