Tune-In blocking foreign radio stations in the UK Master thread

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.