Live Radio
Want to enjoy your favorite radio station's online stream in Roon? Check out our Live Radio directory, a collection of more than 1000 live radio stations, hand-curated by the Roon community. You can browse stations by genre or quickly find your local stations.
As with all streaming content, live radio can be added to your library for easy access later.
Roon's Live Radio directory is an actively maintained database; if you have questions, suggestions, or if there’s a station you can’t find, let our curators know in the Radio Curation category on our community site.
How It Works
You can access our Live Radio Directory to browse stations of all types from all over the world. To find the directory, head to the Navigation Menu and select Live Radio. When you select a station, you can see details about that station, such as the location, the frequency, and the band, if applicable, and much more. You will also see a list of streams that are available for the station, and you can select which gets played by default.
Browsing Live Radio Stations
The Live Radio Browser is separated into two main categories: "Live Radio" and "My Live Radio".
Live Radio
Here you can browse all the stations in our directory by using the following methods:
Categories & Popular Stations
You can browse the categories to find specific genres of music, different types of talk radio, live sports, and sports talk stations. The most popular stations are shown first, and you can see more stations in the category by clicking More:
Locations & Languages
It's possible to find stations from specific regions of the world by using the Locations category. Roon will also automatically show you stations that broadcast near your physical location as you browse the directory. If there are any "local" stations, they will appear at the top of the page. You can configure how close Roon considers "nearby" stations to be by clicking the globe icon. This menu will also allow you to filter all the stations on the page by language.
Search
Roon's search function, powered by Valence, can also be used to find stations.
Simply search for the station(s) you're looking for, and you can see results that include Live Radio stations. For example, when searching in Roon for "NPR":
My Live Radio Stations
If you have favorite radio stations that you want to access quickly, you can save them to My Live Radio. To do this, select a station, click the three-dot menu (⋯), and choose Add to Library. After the station has been added to your library, it will appear in My Live Radio. To view your saved stations, open Roon's menu and select My Live Radio under My Library.
Request new stations and discuss the directory
Notice a station has incorrect information? Is your favorite station missing? Want to chat about your favorites? Head on over to the Live Radio Category of the Roon Community site!
Become a Curator
The Live Radio directory would not exist without the help of our amazing team of Curators. All of the stations you currently see in the directory were entered by Community Curators, and the Curation team continues to maintain the directory today. We're always looking to add passionate members to the team, so if you'd like to help out, please sign up here.
We generally add Curators a couple of times a month, so we'll be sure to reach out to you with more information soon. You don’t need to commit to any specific amount of work or number of stations – all we ask is that you care about making Live Radio the best it can be.
Adding Custom Stations
You can manually add Live Radio stations by choosing ADD STATION on the My Stations screen. You can add stations that stream in MP3, AAC, or FLAC formats. Roon also supports TuneIn web page URLs. You can usually find a streaming URL on the radio station's website, or you can use the URL of a TuneIn web page. For example, KCRW's streaming URL looks like this:
And their TuneIn web page URL looks like this:
Scrobbling
Roon can scrobble Live Radio tracks to Last.fm and ListenBrainz. This feature is disabled by default. Before you can scrobble Live Radio tracks, connect your scrobbling service using one of the following methods:
Method 1: Connect and Enable through Services
Go to Settings → Services.
Under Connected to your profile, find Last.fm or ListenBrainz and click Connect.
Sign in to your account.
Checkmark Scrobble tracks from Live Radio and hit Done.
Method 2: Connect through your Profile
Click your Profile icon in the upper-right corner of Roon or from the Settings menu → Profiles.
Click Edit.
Under Connected to your profile, connect your Last.fm or ListenBrainz account.
Checkmark Scrobble tracks from Live Radio and hit Done.
Click Save.
For more details on scrobbling, please give this article a read.
My added Custom Station does not work
There are several reasons why a live radio station may not play in Roon, ranging from a station server outage, an unsupported URL, issues with the stream format, or regional playback restrictions. Here are the most common limitations we’ve discovered:
- Geo-restricted radio stations. Some radio stations limit the streaming of their content to a certain geographic location. If you are outside this location, these radio stations can’t be added to Roon.
- Website URL. Roon will only accept an audio stream URL, not a radio website URL. Most audio streams end .mp3, .aac, .pls, .m3u, or .m3u8.
- HLS streams. Roon supports HLS streams (HTTP Live Streaming, ending in .m3u8) that use AAC or FLAC audio. Streams using other codecs may not be compatible.
- Missing metadata. Roon can only display metadata that is incorporated within the stream. Even if this information is displayed in the station’s own radio player, Roon cannot access this metadata if a radio station refers to a separate page for currently playing information.
- Non-UK TuneIn references are not supported in the UK. Non-UK streams cannot be added in Roon for users located in the UK: this is a TuneIn limitation. The stream can be added, but it will not play in Roon.
If you're still having issues, please let us know by creating a post in the Live Radio Category on our community.
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