Internet radio links in imported m3u/pls playlist?

No. The playlists must contain paths to actual library tracks.

Thanks for the answer, but do you have a source for that conclusion? I couldn’t find any, and both the m3u and pls formats support internet streams as well as local files, when opened by players other than Sonos.

Imported playlists are indexed along with the local library, so it’s not entirely unreasonable for them to only contain references to library tracks. (They can also point to tracks on unindexed shares, but these must also be local.)

Yes, it’s true that radio station stream lists are often in PLS or M3U format, and those are processed by Sonos as such when you add a radio URL manually.

M3Us in the local library contain track references and are loaded into the queue. You can’t enqueue a radio station.

You’re probably right, but that highlights another limitation that has annoyed me a bit for years: Why not allow queueing radio stations? I was used to that working in winamp back in the days :)

But yes, it’s all likely due to the implementation of streams as a totally separate thing from local library files.

People have been asking about adding radio stations to the queue for years. The motivation was presumably to have some stream source take over when the queue reached that point. Clearly progress down the queue would then stop, unless of course the source subsequently failed.

There’s a philosophical, and architectural, difference between how Sonos handles tracks (in queues and playlists) which can be pre-fetched and buffered, and how it deals with real-time sources.