Welcome to the walled garden. It seems Bauer want the “deep” knowledge of what you’re listening to and when to no doubt market you to death a la Facebook and other enclosed environments. It’s a shame as I listen to a local Edinburgh station owned by Bauer Media when I’m getting ready in the morning for local news, weather and most importantly traffic reports. I used a Sonos Roam in the bathroom which Roon happily connected to through Sonos streaming. For now I’m running the RadioPlayer app on my iPhone and going via Bluetooth which works for my use case but if I wanted a Higher Fidelity experience in another room then it doesn’t really work.
I fear much like the removal of headphone sockets on smartphones Bauer will lead and others will follow. I got redirected to the BBC Sounds app the other day when trying to listen to a “raw” BBC Radio stream.
What might be the answer is an app that you can plug services into (much like the native Sonos app) and they play to a virtual speaker that is a streaming endpoint of http://something_local that Roon can then “listen” to. Conceptually similar to Print to PDF, it’s not really a printer - it’s a local file.
Bit of a pain as I liked having internet radio anywhere I had Roon.
Native Sonos does have a Planet Radio service and Alexa can use it as well so you can say “Alexa, play Forth One in the kitchen” but of course only useful for Sonos endpoints.
I’m sure that if Sonos, Alexa etc have found solutions then Roon can as well. And as you say, where one company goes their competitors are sure to follow. So soon you will only be able to access the more popular streaming services via an app.
So come on Roon, step up and give us an interface!
Before Roon, I signed up to Planet Rock to listen via a web browser as you receiver fewer ads. But it is really spooky when the radio suddenly says something like “Hi Adrian, Wickes in Banbury are offering 10% off stuff today”. I prefer to use the Roon interface; you get a few more ads but the system isn’t trying to talk to you personally!
Well they have done it. I can no longer access any of the Bauer Media stations. I now get a message “Playback was interrupted because a track failed to load.”
So that means I can no longer listen to Planet Rock, Scala Radio, Kerrang! Radio or any of the Absolute Radio stations through ROON.
I need a solution to this problem because I’ve now lost ROON’s multi-room capabiIity for my favourite radio stations.
I understand that ROON may be a bit reluctant to start storing personal info to allow an automatic log in to the web site interface Bauer Media now want you to use. But it must be fairly easy to intercept the audio output from the web browser (Safari in my case) and route it into ROON?
Or could ROON be made to look like an output device?
There are long standing feature requests for something like this, for example
Another route for technically minded people may be to catch the URL and add it to your my live radio. The URL should have your personal token/details and so would not be circumventing Bauer’s wish for your info.
… and unfortunately it doesn’t work after a few hours, as tokens are time limited.
So no solution at this stage for the integration of Bauer stations in Roon…
I’ve scanned through the database and have hidden all the Bauer stations that are no longer available. Some still are, albeit with the warning message. I’ll leave those until they, too, disappear.
I may have missed some, please let me know if you find any that shoud no longer be there.
Let’s hope, but I am pessimistic. Live Radio seems to have low priority and limited resources for its maintenance and development. Some basic features have not been sorted out more than 2 years after the launch (such as being able to stream all existing radio streaming formats) so a heavy modification of the GUI for the management of radio subscriptions sounds unlikely.
OK, so I’ve clearly got no idea what
" Another route for technically minded people may be to catch the URL and add it to your my live radio . The URL should have your personal token/details and so would not be circumventing Bauer’s wish for your info."
actually means.
Which also means that most other people who have paid up for ROON also have no idea either.
Personally, I signed up with a life membership because I thought the multi-room capability and ability to manage CD library and streaming services was brilliant.
So come on guys, its all very well making micro-improvements on the way the search engines work and the way the HMI is displayed, but if we are losing the ability to connect to mainstream internet radio stations then the ROON service is being significantly degraded.
To be fair, ROON used to be able to play Planet Rock, it’s Bauer Mafia that have messed it up by restricting access by imposing log in requirements
But if Sonos can still manage to play Bauer Mafia stations, then it can’t be that hard, can it?
The link is a .pls file which returns a different token each time it is called. (It is actually the number of seconds since 1/1/1970 (the Linux epoch)). In the past we have found these links are time limited so it is possible that you can get a specific period before the token times out. Calling it again would give you another time period.
This is great news, but I had been puzzling that one of our Roberts radios could play the Bauer stations without the warnings, and continued to play them when I could no longer do so via Roon.
The Radiofeeds URLs so far are playing over 60 mins without a problem…hope it continues.
Ok, I’ve added back all the Bauer stations that had been removed. I’ll try and monitor and see if they remain online for us. Let me know if I’ve missed any.
There are some local Greatest Hits Radio stations that also need adjusting. I’ll do these in slow time.
