Rob's tips for uncovering radio station stream URLs | The SWLing Post

Rob's tips for uncovering radio station stream URLs | The SWLing Post

Many radio-listening apps and some old-time internet radio appliances need a stream URL to find a station. This article describes how to use diagnostic tools in your desktop browser to dig through all the Javascript to find the actual stream URL for a radio livestream.

RELATED: radio-browser.info is a crowdsourced database of over 40,000 radio streams around the world. A GeoMap makes it easy to browse for streams in a particular part of the world. You can add map entries: I just added one for 4RPH Reading Radio in Brisbane. In turn, apps like RadioDroid use this database to find streams for listening. Unfortunately, some radio megacorporations s use stream-hopping techniques to force listeners to use their apps.

A 2014 article (updated in 2020) suggests using packet-sniffer tools to grab URLs and has a list of frequently used streaming domains, media types, and file extensions to look for.