Internet radio player URLs

Editor’s note. 2025-07-19. Following the BBC’s recent radio stream fiasco, this page has been rewritten and updated. The streams and links listed below should work properly now, with separate linked pages for BBC DASH and BBC HLS streams.

Regular readers already know that the BBC has a nasty habit of breaking its internet radio streams. In fairness, other radio stations do this too sometimes. But other stations are not as secretive about their internet radio stream URL’s as the BBC appears to be. This page is an attempt to mitigate this and provide up-to-date URLs for various radio streams. This is a modernised and rather more useful version of the old  “GarfNet Internet Radio Player” that we built back in the day when we ran Joomla. Today, we prefer to test and list the working URLs as links, and then let our readers decide how they wish to play them.

Latest BBC national & local radio streams

In its infinite wisdom, seems the BBC has taken to changing its radio streams URL’s as often as some people change their underpants. It’s become quite a struggle just to keep up. To make the maintenance a little more straightforward, we have split the BBC HLS streams off to a new page. We have also created a new list of alternative BBC DASH streams. Fortunately, the BBC seldom breaks all its streams at the same time, hopefully some of these streams should still stay up when the Beeb breaks the others, At least, that’s the general idea…

• BBC DASH streams
• BBC HLS streams

Internet radio streams

This forms a de-facto internet radio player too. Just click the URL and most browsers will find a way to play it…

About general radio streams

This list contains around 100 or so non-BBC internet radio player URLs, plus a few BBC World Service streams. Many of the URL’s listed will play directly from most modern browsers. We have tested them in Firefox and Chromium for GNU/Linux. Your mileage my vary. Click on a URL and see what happens. Others are in the form of a playlist (*.m3u, *.m3u8 or *.pls) and will probably require your default media player. In this case, your  browser may give you a choice to either download the file or play with default media player. In most cases, you would probably select play with default media player. Exact wording of messages will vary from one browser to another.

Alternatively, you may copy the URLs and use them in an internet radio application of your choice. You can find instructions for the popular VLC player further down this page. And if you have time, let us know how it worked for you in the comments box at the bottom of the page. Don’t forget to tell us what browser and operating system you are using. 

General radio streams as a VLC/SMPlayer compatible “*.m3u playlist

• general-radio.m3u

General radio streams as a simple plain text list

• general-radio.txt

About our M3U playlists

1. These provide a collection of radio streams and present them as a playlist in your media player (VLC or SMPlayer). Every object on the playlist is a radio station.
2. These should work on any modern device with an internet connection and any reasonably good media player. Though it works best with VLC or SMPlayer on GNU/Linux. 🙂
3. Most of these stations are English language. However there are a few foreign language stations too, mostly by request of family, friends and regular readers.
4. A *.m3u file is actually a simple plain-text file, containing a list of files or URLs. None of these stations is hosted here. This text file is merely a list of links. In this instance you can also download the file (right-click > “Save as”). Then you may copy it to any (or all) of your devices. Providing your devices have an internet connection and a reasonably proficient media player, our *.m3u file will give you access to all these stations. More about M3U format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U
5. Also bear in mind that radio streams change quite regularly and servers sometimes go off-line. This means that some stations may not work all the time.
6. Our *.m3u playlists are  open source. So hack them about and do what you will with them! If you manage to do something really interesting with them, then please let me know about it. 🙂

Playing Internet radio streams

On most modern browsers, you can play the stream URLs directly from your browser window. This is particularly true for the standard MP3. Simply click on the link and hopefully it will play. More complex proprietary streams such as those listed in the BBC streams table will probably need a proper media player, such as VLC or similar. In which case, you may need to copy the stream URL and paste it into the player of your choice. Here’s how to do it with VLC…

1. In VLC, select from the top menu: Media > Network Stream.
2. In the VLC “Open Media” dialogue, select: “Network” tab.
3. Paste or type your chosen station URL into the “Please enter a network URL” box. E.g.
   • http://stream.live.vc.bbcmedia.co.uk/bbc_6music
4. Click the “Play” button.

VLC is available for MS Windows, Mac OSX, GNU/Linux, Android and iOS. It is free, open source, with no hidden nasties or gotchas. It is also one of the best and most versatile media players ever created. Debian-based GNU/Linux users probably already have VLC in your distro’s repositories. In which case it is a simple matter of typing the following into a terminal window and pressing the “return” key…

sudo apt install vlc

If you use some other operating system then you may download it for free from…

• https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Recording internet radio streams

There are several ways to do this.

Recording directly from browser (old shoutcast type streams only)

For old-school shoutcast streams, on most modern browsers, you can simply click “File” > “Save Page As” or similar on the actual player page, as it is playing, and it will write the stream to disk. Works well except that to stop recording, you need to go into your browser’s download manager and forcefully cancel the download. This often erases what you have just saved. So you must make a copy of the streamed file before you cancel the download. Which is a bit crude and hacky!

Recording using VLC

VLC will also record the stream for you too, in a somewhat more elegant manner.

1. Do the same as you did above to play a radio stream in VLC, up to stage 3.
2. Carefully click the down arrow that’s attached to the “Play” button.
3. Select “Record”.
4. Use the standard “Browse…” button to select where you wish to save the file.

Recording using yt-dlp

Many radio streams are also recordable using the excellent yt-dlp.  It is a command line tool written in python initially designed to rip Youtube video. But these days it rips all sorts of streams, example…

yt-dlp http://media-ice.musicradio.com:80/ClassicFMMP3

There are various ways to install it depending on your system. I used the python-based pipx method. But there are many other ways too:-

• More info…
  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Installation

Other streaming radio station lists

Ours is certainly not the only internet radio stream list on the worldwide web. There are several really good ones out there that readers may find helpful. These are sites that also list the actual stream URLs, rather than attempting to obfuscate them. We visit these sites fairly regularly as they provide quite a lot of the URL’s that we display here.

These are lists that have been very helpful in compiling our lists

Often they also “cut to the chase” and list the actual stream URL’s, or at least they don’t make it hard to find them. 

• https://hiresaudio.online/category/radio/
  • CD quality internet radio URLs…
    https://www.hiresaudio.online/cd-quality-internet-radio/
  • High resolution internet radio URLs…
    https://www.hiresaudio.online/hires-internet-radio/
• https://listenlive.nl
• http://radiofeeds.co.uk
• https://radio-browser.info

Other lists, that may be useful too

• https://onlineradiobox.com/uk/
• http://radiotime.com/
• http://radiostationworld.com/
• https://www.radio-uk.co.uk

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