Roon and internet radio: disappointing

The URL of the TuneIn page:

Roon can play back stations that stream in MP3 or AAC formats, and 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.

Roon KB

Andrew

I’ve added Radio Stations by using the Tunein links and 99.9% of the time these work, but if I try the direct Station URL’s 99.9% of the time these don’t work.

Am I just unlucky with the station URL’s I look at or is there a knack to doing it?

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Hi John,

Are you using a streaming URL (often set out on a station webpage) or the URL of the webpage of the station ? The latter will not work. If you are using a streaming URL then it may be because the station has changed it and not updated their webpage.

I have about 20 stations, most of them I’ve created using TuneIn pages and then upgrading to URL links found in the Swap Meet thread.

Do you have any extant stations you want to use that are not working ? If so, I’ll open a general thread dealing with URL issues so we can all help one another.

I still don’t understand why url’s for hls streams such as BBC radio are converted to AAC by Roon. JRiver plays HLS url’s directly and with much better sound quality… I don’t mind having to put individual URL’s into Roon but why convert them to lower quality AAC files?

Has Roon considered utilizing Wifiradio-frontier (Frontier Silicon) who have a portal that is already populated with thousands of stations and which also allows you to add your own favourite url’s if you wish? I don’t know what it would cost for a licence but on the surface it would seem to address many of our issues. Music can be sorted by genre, country and bit rate. You need a password to log on.
My Magnum Dynalab internet tuner comes with this pre-installed. The advantage of have the functionality within Roon is convenience and a “one stop” listening source. Thoughts?

Mike i am also a CXN user and love their radiostations for the Roon i use an Sotm sms200 as a roon endpoint wow sounds great wish Roon hadthe same way to search for internet radio stations as Cambridge has i am with you.

I would soooooooooooo much like an import button with just a file with all personal internet radio URLs

Adding every station manually is lame. And the links are in Roons ldb files which are not really readable :wink: i can understand that.

best regards,

Armin

I would like to add my voice to this list too. Please add better internet radio functionality. Browsing by user added links should be possible at the very least. I’m loving Roon but there’s still some improvements to be made.

I tried adding “www.thisstrangeradio.com” to Roon but failed. My CXR plays it perfectly…

Copy the link that appears under “Other”: http://thisstrangeradio.com/listen.m3u
This works with Roon.

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I get it now, that’s simple enough and works great. Thank you.

NT. I just found the answer I was looking for in another thread :wink:

Guys - Love Roon with a passion but as an integrator desperately trying to get clients to come on board the stumbling block is radio. My clients need something simple like Tunein and their nature means that doing via url’s simply doesn’t cut it. I could sell Roon to most everyone if you had this, but at he moment it almost kills all attempts to get clients on board. What chance?

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@Ian_Bolt an (and others)

I find it surprising why the internet radio function of Roon appears to have had little of any updates over the last couple of years (the last main update I believe was with Roon 1.2, but I may be mistaken here). Appreciate there’s a vast amount of other projects/features that the Roon team have/are working on, but I’m like you Ian and find it difficult to understand the lack of any visible work being carried out on this by Roon.

@brian Not asking you to spill all the beans, but is there any work planned, or being carried out now, for future improvements to the Internet Radio function of Roon? I find it a valuable function of Roon, and like Ian above feel it could be a big positive to potential customers (Roon, may have stats that suggest otherwise).

I know timelines are not a thing Roon discuss on here, and I’m not asking for that, but would be nice to know if there are current plans for a ‘robust’ update to the Internet radio function.

Any info would be appreciated :+1:

Cheers
John

Yes, we are building an internet radio directory. It’s in active development right now.

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@brian

Appreciate the feedback :+1:

I suppose another benefit (and I assume this is the case), if the radio station is within the Roon directory then it’s been tested to work, and possibly will have a way to automatically update in the background if the link changes. Also it will automatically link to the highest resolution source for that particular station (or may be compromises if the highest bitrate is not consistent with good playback and may be a lower resolution with best playback).

Not trying to push you in any particular direction (and this may be part of a large GUI update in the future), but would be good to have a refresh of the way the stations are presented. At present a very large logo with additional info, whereas if it was a larger list of the subscribed radio stations, and then an option to access additional info via a right click or other means.

Appreciate timelines are along the lines of ‘how long is a piece of string’ :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:, but good to hear work is continuing in the background with a directory

Cheers
John

Yeah, the entire user experience for radio has been redesigned from scratch. It’s nothing like what is there now.

Yes to your two points–stations from the directory will be automatically updated as new streams appear (or are retired). Yes, the plan includes reliability testing–which will incorporate both feedback from successful/failed plays within Roon as well as some kind of more explicit testing from our servers.

The stations will be drawn from a few sources, including stations that have been entered into the current radio interface (obviously this requires a bit of data mining/cleaning/grooming/deduping/etc to make it nice).

We’re going to make a moderation interface (website, outside of app) available too, so people from the community (including end users, partner companies, dealers, etc–remember lots of languages + regions of radio to cover, and plenty of interested stakeholders tied to those markets) can help keep things clean and organized and complete–very much like the system we built for creating/maintaining translations of the Roon interface.

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This ticks a lot of boxes and I’m very much looking forward to it.

A few suggestions if I may:

The current Internet Radio Play icons are a bit small to hit with a finger on a tablet or phone (Maybe I’m just fat fingered …). This may already be fixed in the redesign.

I’d like to be able to queue an Internet Radio station in the Queue, so that after a selection of Albums or Tracks have played an Internet Radio station will start instead of Roon Radio.

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In the new design, radio stations have details screens like albums/artists/etc, so the play button follows that treatment.

Queueing radio…that is not part of the plan as of today, but it’s worth some discussion.

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This is welcome news.
I wonder if a facility to download and play Podcasts is planned?

I hope for BBC on demand material one day. Biggest feature I miss from LMS.

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