Custom URL Without Tunein

AFAICT, if I search Hirschmilch Radio Chillout on Sonos Radio, you will get the TuneIn station, which is a re-broadcast of the official Hirschmilch stream. You will get ads, but you won’t get the interruptions.

Sonos Radio has some Sonos-specific streams which will not have ads. If you pay for Sonos Radio HD, you won’t get ads, but why would I pay for that if the streams I want are available elsewhere (and I would happily pay for them directly if it were possible).

All global broadcasts are provided by TuneIn.

For Sonos-owned and operated stations only. Excludes global broadcast stations. https://www.sonos.com/en-us/sonos-radio

Sonos might not get the ad revenue, but I don’t care about that -- I don’t want ads on free streams, and I don’t want Sonos gatekeeping my access to freely available streams (yes, i can use workarounds, so it’s light-touch gatekeeping)
 

Right now, I’m testing whether I get additional ads using the stream accessed via Sonos Radio.

How does one expect “free” streams to remain free without some sort of revenue being generated?  Licensing and distribution costs money, and last time I checked, the penalties for not paying those fees aren’t conducive to staying on the air.

​@jgatie AFAICT, TuneIn is just a middleman that provides discovery, and Sonos has partnered with them and intentionally (given the mobile client fiasco it could be accidental, though even previously the old TuneIn app managed custom stream favorites) made it difficult to access streams directly. 15m of searching and I can’t find any information on TuneIn paying streamers -- nothing on TuneIn’s site indicates they pay streamers.

I’m fine with directly supporting streamers (and I have donated to Groove Salad for years). I have no idea how any streamer makes money if they don’t have donations or a paid service--most of the small ones seem to do it for love (and then disappear).

Sonos makes a great platform for streams to directly profit via the service integrations. I pay Hearts of Space a ridiculous amount of money because they are integrated with Sonos!

Honestly, if TuneIn pays streamers a reasonable (i.e. over half of their subscription cost), I’d love to know that and would definitely support them via TuneIn. I just can’t find any mention of this, and I would expect it to be a great marketing point.

Agree on this. The TuneIn integration is an absolute UX disaster and overly complicated. Too many steps and when you name your favorite station, the station name doesn’t save and carry through. Just shows the URL.

URL streaming worked perfect in the previous app, and Sonos broke it with the disaster of the new app. I’ve been waiting over 2 years for this to be restored to how it was.

I have my own locally streaming URL radio services and it’s about all I listen to. 

This needs to be as simple as add URL in the app, and be able to name it or have it pull the name from the station itself. This is how it worked for years and should work again.

Sorry, long post/rant

I'm in the UK, as (I hope) you probably know, we're geo/landlocked because of a legal case by Sony and Warner, launched off the back of unpaid royalties from foreign listeners to the labels in the broadcast countries.

The only radio station I want to listen to is a fantastic alternative/indie station based in Northeast USA; they generally play small label material.  I can't access this through TuneIn, but I can listen off the station's app without issue and Bluetooth it into my Sonos network.

I'd love to just have this as an option (as a source??) so I can simply squirt that stream to my speakers.

Have you tried adding your favourite station to TuneIn? Or would it also be geo locked?

Exactly. This is such a basic feature that I’m surprised Sonos still doesn’t support it. I’m not asking Sonos to add every radio station in the world. I’m asking for the same functionality that countless radio players have offered for decades: Add Custom Station.

Just two fields:
• Station name
• Stream URL

Done!

Sonos speakers are already connected directly to the internet I’m paying for. If I know a station’s streaming URL, the speaker should be able to play it without depending on whether a third-party radio directory carries it.

Instead, users are forced through streaming directories and aggregators that control what stations are available and, in some cases, insert their own preroll ads before the station even starts.

AirPlay isn’t a substitute. I bought Sonos so it could stream directly from the internet, independently of my phone. My phone shouldn’t spend hours acting as a middleman for a stream the speaker could fetch on its own.

Adding a custom station isn’t an advanced feature. It’s a fundamental capability for any internet-connected audio player.

This is still a feature of the Sonos devices: my app “Phonos Ultimate” exposes this directly.

However, the listing of these stations is deliberately hidden in the official S2 apps, in two ways: firstly TuneIn Classic (the “my radio stations” UX that was hijacked to expose stations) is hidden, and secondly if you make it a Favorite it too is hidden in the UX. (Except on the Desktop app which will show it).

S1 still has it all in the official apps.