I am a Sonos super-fan. When they get criticized unfairly, I defend them. Sorry.

I LOVE my Sonos which is why I am so frustrated at this stupid lawsuit and stupid inability to listen to what we want. It’s all about money and greed which winds me up enormously. I am furious at the U.K. justice system anyway so believe me when I say that them passing this lawsuit is definitely not something I agree with. 🤯

I can’t believe that I am finally hearing my favourite radio station again…. I feel like I have a part of my life back! Sorry if that sounds dramatic but it’s true. I feel that there could be clearer directions given on the Sonos website on how to obtain the streaming url. So THANK YOU controlav for providing me with the fix that I’ve been looking for in the past few weeks! It’s a shame that the Sonos support advisors could not provide this when requested. You should be the Sonos advisor and support developer!

The method to determine streaming urls varies substantially as there are so many different ways of hosting streams on web sites. This one was easy-peasy though, just head to read first few lines of the Javascript on their web site.

I think I’ll keep my day job thanks - Xbox is a lot of fun (though I did get a job offer from Sonos a few years ago).

Another tweak I found to adding stations manually. I tried adding Psychedelik Ambient from the URL in the PLS file which didn’t work. Eventually I removed the ‘s’ from https:// to become http://  and it worked.

You also need to remove any non functioning stations from TuneIn / My Radio Stations and Sonos favourites before adding them again manually.

Can someone help me with info on how to add and then find a radion station if I add the URL?

I added HBR1 (as an example) and then it just disappeared into oblivion. No-where to be seen in the station lists.

Thanks.

TuneIn > My Radio Stations

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/260

Thanks for that. But every URL I put doesn’t seem to work and what I do not like is that we must use TuneIn! It is not a service I like and I much preferred Radio.net until Sonos took it down.

You may be using an incompatible URL, if it’s simply been copied from a player embedded in a webpage. It needs to point to a MP3, AAC or WMA stream, often wrappered in a PLS or ASX playlist. 

BTW the My Radio Stations item is tucked into the TuneIn menu but it’s actually independent of TuneIn. If you were to add a custom station to My Sonos/Favorites you could then remove the TuneIn service and the link would still work. Custom URLs are stored locally on the system.

Probably 90% of my Sonos listening is BBC radio, either live or as listen again to specific shows, through TuneIn. 

This week, the BBC show listen again links in Tunein haven’t been updated (ie they link to shows from 2+ weeks ago); today, TuneIn won’t connect to any BBC stations. 

/edit - looks like TuneIn won’t connect to *any* stations right now]. 

Any pointers on what this is, other than a return to TuneIn’s usual flaky BS after a few months of it blissfully working as it’s supposed to?

TuneIn is back up for live streams for BBC stations, but 2-3 weeks on still doesn’t have updated links for most shows. Things like Friday Night Comedy are updating, but I’m guessing that’s because it’s a podcast/ RSS. 

I’m wondering if the listen again issues are part of the BBC pulling itself away from TuneIn for radio, and trying to shift everything to BBC Sounds as per: https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/entries/37e4e3f6-fbd2-4c14-8d72-7f7139641582. The BBC Sounds app on iOS apparently already streams to Sonos, but Android users are SoL...

Hi

Just bought a Sonos One SL. I have the app on my phone.

1. I’ve set up Spotify, which is the streaming service I use. Getting there..

However…

2. I’m trying to use the Radio with little success. In the list of stations, I can’t find the ones I want to listen to and there appears to be no search facility! All I want is BBC Radio 6, which can’t be found, and I’ve given up on trying to search for Alpha Boy Old School Radio,

Disappointingly I’ve spent more time trying to work the thing than listen to music on it. 

Also, the room icon (family room) appears on screen all the time when music is played. This obscures the app controls. How the hell do you get rid of that? It's like a bad itch that never goes away.

Please help me out of this technological hell.

Thanks

D

There is a search facility in the Sonos app - the fourth of the five icons at the bottom of the screen - and “stations” is one of the filters. BBC Radio 6 appears in MyTuner Radio and elsewhere, but you might need to add MyTuner Radio  in the Services and Voice section first. 

It has been a few weeks. I popped back in hoping that maybe someone had come up with some innovative solutions! LIKE….

• a list of all the tunein stations we lost and their URLs - I know there are site out there that list radio stations with a variety of success
• a way of importing said radio stations in bulk!
• a way of organising said radio stations within ‘My Radio Stations’ into folders
• a way of adding station logo to added ‘My Radio Stations’

Another thing, I asked earlier about use of a VPN to easily ‘recover’ the stations ‘lost’ to the UK. I fired up my Nord to point to the US and launched S1. The missing stations re-appear on TuneIn however the ones that have been removed from UK users still won’t play. 

This isn’t a surprise to me. When I originally raised it I guessed it would need a hardware VPN at the router? Has nobody tried that - I don’t have one?

My guess is that I can fool the software but not the hardware and there must be something that talks between the two because using the VPN the controller software still shows my local stations as my region of the UK.

Rather than mess around with VPNs, just locate the URLs for the stations you like to listen to and add them to My Radio Stations.

As you say the VPN would have to be at router level as Tunein streams to the actual speakers. Weather Sonos stamp the speakers with a location is anyones guess.

I get that, Ratty and I’ve done it on one station that is a favourite but I like to browse impatiently within a genre which is not so good if there’s only a couple of stations left now and they’re not playing what you like!

Hence the other part of my question - any way of grouping stations within ‘My Radio Stations’ so I am not scrolling a massive list all the time?

Regarding VPN - you can set up a Raspberry pi to act as both a gateway pointing at a VPN, and as a wi-fi hotspot provided it is itself on a wired network connection.  Connect the Sonos to the wifi network created by the Pi, and you should appear to be outside the UK.  Downside is that, well, you are then outside the UK and a lot of UK streams are geo-blocked - including most of the 320k BBC streams, and switching VPN locations takes a bit of fiddling.  There’s a couple of articles on line that explain how to do this, so let me know if you’re interested and I’ll dig out the links.

On organising My Stations, the best I’ve been able to come up with is (a) rename each station in My Stations with a number (so all my UK stations are renamed something like 01 - BBC Radio 3, the French ones are 02 - FIP and so on) so at least I have some control over where they are in the list, and (b) add dummy streams using the add streams function so I can then use the rename function to create headers (something like 02 ******FRANCE****** ) which makes it easier to see where the groups change in the list.  It works, but it shouldn’t be this hard!

Thanks mate, it really ought not to be that hard! I’m not going to do the pi solution as I’ve enough convoluted tech in the house already. The missus will be stuffed when I snuff it! In addition I sometimes listen to a local beeb station for a footy match. I guessed your solution would be the way I went down though even then, searching for streams, copying them in, monitoring them for inevitable changes - all a pain in the bahooky. Just when you get the system stable and doing what you want it goes and changes <grr> 

So I found My Radio Stations within TuneIn Radio.  I went to “Add a Radio Station”.  I put in the URL http://www.smoothjazz247.com/multiplayer247.htm as you suggested that would work.  I do see that it asks for the streaming URL

When I try to play I get the message  that its not encoded correctly

I have looked at the source code for the page but I do not know enough to work out which is the streaming url.   Can someone help?

I think that link is intended for an embedded player (in a webpage). If you look on the station’s home page they have a link hiding under a button entitled “Use your MP3 player” and that seems to work:

http://www.smoothjazz247.com/smoothjazz24-7.m3u

Thanks very much.   I can now pretend I am at Pizza Express Dean Street…………  One day soon maybe

It’s really a pain these radios disappearing, I understand it’s not exactly Sonos’ fault but they don’t seem to be handling the fall out very gracefully, or at all…

I’ve had mixed results with stream urls. Most work fine.

Some don’t. In particular this one https://classicrock.stream.ouifm.fr/ouifm3.mp3 works fine in VLC but not with Sonos. Wonder if that provider is actively blocking Sonos based on User Agent header or something...

That seems to work fine on my Sonos, as does the alternative:

http://classicrock.stream.ouifm.fr/ouifm3.aac

Strangely, they seemed to be playing different stations!  Either that or there was a big difference in stream timings.

Edit: I note that your link is https.  I actually used http.  Therein probably lies the answer.  Different security protocols in VLC and Sonos?

Anyway, try http.