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Getting rid of ads on Radio


I’ll start by saying I really can’t stand watching or listening to broadcast ads. I don’t listen to commercial radio. I don’t watch commercial television. I happily buy albums through Bandcamp to support artists directly, and to discover new music I pay for a streaming service which is ad free. 

I also really love some of the Community Radio stations that operate in my home city and want to keep listening to them at home.   

A few months ago my Sonos system has started playing ads when I first connect to one of the community radio stations it happens whether I connect via my Google Assistant, or manually select the stations  through the app. I’ve tried to bypass this by “adding radio stations” directly via the direct URL as is recommended in some other comments on the forum, but this doesn’t do anything to stop the ads. I’ve also added the stations through the Sonos Radio service, rather than the TuneIn service, but I still get the TuneIn ads. In the end I decided whilst frustrating, I could live with it - after all the ads only  play  when you first connect. 

Then today I got 5 ads in a row, which cut in right in the middle of a track I was enjoying. Too bad if I was listening to an interview or waiting to hear about upcoming gigs - TuneIn will just play ads right over the top…

I see that ‘Sonos Radio’ premium states it will be ad-free but only for stations it controls, which would exclude my beloved Community Radio stations. 

Does anyone have a workaround? About the only way I can figure at the moment is to play to my Sonos Roam via Bluetooth to avoid TuneIn altogether -  or buy one of the Sonos devices with a Line-In and do it that way.

Fuming pretty hard that my supposedly premium smart speaker setup has forcing ads upon me when I’ve managed to mostly avoid them for years. 

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Best answer by bockersjv 3 May 2022, 11:45

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2 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

It’s TuneIn that’s serving the ads, not Sonos.

If you set up your radio stations using their direct streaming URLs, you can circumvent TuneIn and its ads, but you’ll need to use a desktop (PC or Mac) controller app to do this:

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/260?language=en_US

You can also add Radioplayer to your Sonos system as an alternative to TuneIn. It’s possible that it has no or fewer adds.

Userlevel 7
Badge +21

This thread may help:-