TuneIn Radio App for MAC Archives

Want to know how to tune in on Digital Radio? Would you like to listen online? We've got all the answers here.

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How can I listen to Classic FM?

Click here to listen live to Classic FM online.

Click here to listen again to Classic FM shows you've missed.

You can also listen to Classic FM...

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What can I do if illegal broadcasters are causing interference and hampering my enjoyment of Classic FM?

Ofcom have amended the procedure for the reporting of interference from illegal broadcasters. Listeners, in addition to commercial radio broadcasters, are now able to report instance of interference caused by illegal broadcasters direct to Ofcom. You can report the problem here.

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How many listeners tune into Classic FM?

Classic FM is proud to currently have approximately 5.6 million listeners in the UK, ranging in age from 0 - 100!

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Why can I not receive Classic FM on my digital radio?

Find out if your area is covered by Digital Radio .
To find out more about all aspects of digital radio you can visit the Get Digital Radio website .

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How can I listen to audio clips or watch video online?

If you are having trouble viewing our live video streams or hearing the audio feed, there is likely to be a simple solution to the problem. The most common problem is that your computer does not have the correct software installed. All the software required is completely free: see below for details.

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What software do I need?

For PCs

Operating System: Windows 95 or higher. Browser: Internet Explorer version 4 or higher (Note: versions 3 and below are not compatible) and Firefox. Netscape users may experience problems when looking at the site and player.
To download Microsoft Internet Explorer, click here .


For Macs

Operating System: Mac OS X or higher. Browser: Internet Explorer or Safari.

Please note that the player will not automatically prompt you to install the latest version of Flash.

The hardware you need: A computer that meets the minimum requirements to playback stations. This minimum specification refers to the 'power' of the computer, as well as having an installed and working, modem or other internet connection, soundcard and speakers. We recommend the following as a minimum specification:- 166MHz processor or higher 16-bit soundcard Speakers (connected!) 28.8kbps modem or better. (We suggest 56.6 kbps or hi-bandwidth connection for best results).

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Why won't the 'Listen Now' player launch?

Our 'Listen Now' player launches in a new window and pulls in information from several different servers. If you have Norton Anti-virus or Firewall software installed on your computer, you may experience some difficulties loading our player properly. If you have trouble accessing the player, please contact your Firewall support centre for help.

It is also worth checking that your Pop-up Blockers are turned off. Most pop-up blockers are installed automatically with your system software either within the browser toolbar, or within the Windows Taskbar along the bottom right corner of your screen. It is possible that you may have more than one pop-up blocker running and you will have to disable all of them for the player to work properly. If you are listening from work it may be that your office IT network has placed a block on certain kinds of pop-ups. Unfortunately we have no control over these. Please contact your IT support team for further information.

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I want to listen again to a show but I can't find it on the player, where can I find it?

You can access our Listen On-Demand service to catch up on every Classic FM show up to seven days after broadcast here. The Listen On-Demand service is also available on the app for iOS and Android devices.

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Why can't I listen back to one piece of music?

The UK Radioplayer, a new cross-industry media player, offers the output of every licensed UK radio station and let users search this content by subject, musical style, or even song title.

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When I click ‘Listen Live’ will it know I am using a Mac?

Yes, the player will automatically detect when you are accessing via a Mac and, providing you have Silverlight installed it will load the Listen Live tab.

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I cannot load the listen live tab on my Mac.

To use the player on an Apple Mac, please install Silverlight. You should be prompted to do this when you load the player. Alternatively, click here to download it from Microsoft.

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Do I need a licence to play a radio in the work place?

For more information on playing a radio in the work place, please click here.

Still having problems?

If you have not been able to resolve your listening enquiry via the FAQs, check out our troubleshooting guide which covers more listening online problems.

Suffering cabin fever? Need an escape? Internet radio can fling open the doors.

Whisper a few call letters into a smart speaker, summon a smartphone app, or tap a few computer keys to be whisked far, far away from your locked-down existence, transported across the country or half-way round the world, with nary a ticket to buy or passport to show. You won’t even need to put on a mask.

Wanna hang on a hot Brazilian beach with a nouveau Girl from Ipanema? The internet radio station Paul in Rio can take you there. California Dreaming of a ride up Laurel Canyon with local legends singing in your ears? Dial into SomaFM’s Left Coast 70s. For those who had planned a London entertainment getaway before all hell broke loose, BBC 4 radio dramas can still shine a light on West End acting talents. And BBC Radio 6 is great for pulling out punchy rock club concerts from its archives. More into the Paris café scene? An atmospheric soundtrack of cool-school and Django-ing gypsy jazz is just a tap (and snifter of cognac) away on the city’s sublime TSF Jazz and FIPS autour du Jazz outlets.

Even the most esoteric of musical (and informational) tastes—from Bollywood to Schlager—are served by the dozens on internet radio: Digital audio services you call up on any web-connected speaker, computer, or smartphone. Better still, most of these stations are free of commercials, thanks to government and listener funding, college backing, or private endowment by the creator.

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The Great American Songbook station, based in the Netherlands, is a perfect example. Station fan Peter Skiera, general manager of internet radio maker Como Audio, touts this station as “a labor of love by a retired broadcaster [Rene Dussen] with a basement full of records and a small recording studio. To these ears, the station’s content rivals that of pay-radio SiriusXM’s Siriusly Sinatra channel, but as with all internet radio streams, both live and on-demand, the price of admission to The Great American Songbook is free.

How to tune in to internet radio

If you know a station’s call letters or name, it’s a snap to haul in a specific internet radio station on a computer or smart device—just type it in or speak to a smart speaker like an Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod.

For deep-sea fishing in the great unknown, though, it pays to go through a radio station aggregator: An online database of curated links to radio stations searchable by location, genre, popularity, and—sometimes—stream quality.

First among many, and first in my heart, is TuneIn Radio, the 800-pound gorilla of internet radio station aggregators. TuneIn Radio comes pre-installed or is loadable on more than 200 connected devices, including smart speakers from the likes of Sonos and Bose, smart TVs, streaming media players (e.g., Roku and Amazon Fire TV), smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles (Xbox and PlayStation), and personal computers.

With a global database of more than 100,000 stations in 197 countries and 22 languages, plus 5.7 million podcasts and on-demand show offerings, TuneIn comes closest to world radio completeness (and domination). Senior director of marketing Ana Guillen tells me it is now attracting 75 million listeners a month and has witnessed an especially strong 53-percent uptick in news content listenership as the COVID-19 pandemic has escalated.

The most notable gap in TuneIn’s channel library are the 853 commercial stations in 153 U.S. markets owned by iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications). To access those, you need to tap into the iHeartRadio app and portal, likewise accessible for free on internet radios, smartphones, tablets, computers, and similar connected devices. Aiming to become a one-stop destination (and sell more advertising), iHeartRadio also serves up mass appeal playlists and personalized music stations (a la Pandora); has distribution deals with commercial radio chains in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; and also links listeners to some non-aligned stations. But the service doesn’t have nearly the global reach or stylistic diversity of TuneIn or other hard-striving streaming radio promoters.

Veteran internet radio aggregator VTuner does have a database that rivals TuneIn. About 30 staffers toil in the Philippines to keep its inventory of station formats, URLs, and streaming codecs up to date. Literally hundreds of world stations presenting in a particular category are accessible with a single tap on VTuner’s barebones, but functional website. I also appreciate that this app lets a user search through its inventory by the sonic quality of signal (more on that momentarily). The VTuner platform powers several lines of smart speakers and A/V receivers, though in recent years it has lost significant market share to Airable, a rival based in Germany.

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Want to be led by the hand to “the most popular” local stations in a music, information or sports radio category? The on-screen guide for MediaU (also based in Germany) offers user-friendly graphics and a sophisticated batch of Euro-centric picks. What’s #1 on their Country station roundup? Prague-based Country Radio, featuring Czech-language singing cowboys. Hearing is believing.

I’ve also had good luck fishing in the waters of Radio.net. And I found some interesting, net-only stations on Internet-radio.com, although the entries on its “Featured” list suggest paid-for positioning. The top picks there are Classic Rock Florida HD, Smooth Jazz Florida, and Modern Jukebox Radio.

Radio.Garden is the most playful and eccentric aggregator of all. This highly engaging, super-fast search tool can be easily planted on a smartphone or tablet via an iOS or Android app. (But the site was characterized as “not secure” and needing third-party software intercession before I could load it on my iMac.) Open this thing up on a screen and you’re presented an animated map of the world. Tap a location dot and up pops selected picks from the immediate area and nation.

Now tap Search and the gardener provides immediate access to radio outlets by country, city or call letters, plus bouquets of “Our Favorite Stations,” playfully categorized as Independent Stations, Energetic Rhythms (electronic, dance), Time Travel (content from decades gone by), Weird Frequencies (like Theatre Organ Radio and Birdsong Radio), and Ends of the Earth (self-explanatory). As I write, I’m listening to a very trippy electronica outlet from Bristol, UK: Noods Radio. The eerie, otherworldly strains make me feel like I’m living in a very strange movie.

To my mind, true internet radio stations are independent, curated, and free; they’re not corporate, computerized, and costly. You might not hear a DJ’s voice or even see a meta-data screen tag identifying the artists and tracks on a station like KCRW-Eclectic24. (That’s where song-identifying services like Shazam come in handy.) And hours or even days of programming might be scheduled in advance on the studio’s servers.

But the quirkiness of the selections, the themes laid out in the segues indicate the presence of a human being, not an algorithm, making the aesthetic calls and structuring the playlist. And when necessary, the shows can be turned on a dime. A recent, hour-long afternoon “sweep” of rustic folk classics like Sam Stone and Illegal Smile playing on Eclectic24 was all the announcement I needed to know that John Prine had just died, and that someone at the station was mourning and paying tribute.

Internet radio sound quality

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Internet radio used to get a deserved rap for sound quality “approaching AM quality.” No longer. The lossy digital compression schemes deployed in mid-1990s streaming audio players like RealAudio and Nullsoft were crude and extreme, with low bit rates chopping off each song’s head, tail, and feet to squeeze it through the modest data pipe available to private internet users at the time.

Even into the early 2000s, it was common to find “perceptual coded” MP3 streams running at rates as low as 16Kbps—buying into the psycho-acoustic theory that louder sounds obscure quieter ones, so why bother to shove all that “extra” data down the pipe? MP3 freaked the hell out of discerning musicians like Neil Young, who knew what was being lost in translation.

The story is different today, judging from VTuner’s posted transmission rates (information users can also call up on Como Audio radio displays). Even technically and financially strapped stations in third-world countries are serving up MP3 content encoded at 48-, 56-, and 64Kbps, or else working with the more efficient AAC codec at bit rates of 32- or 48Kbps, typically with a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. In more sophisticated web-radio operations, bit rates from 128- to 192-, and even 320Kbps are becoming increasingly common, with the latter characterized as “high resolution.”

“The only downside to streaming at 320Kbps,” Skiera says, “is that you might run out of network capacity on the home network when you have five connected speakers all playing at the high-resolution rate.”

Como Audio speakers (and some rival brands) also support the rarely used MPEG-DASH, ASF and podcast-securitizing HTTPS formats. Skiera says Como has no intention of integrating lossless codecs like FLAC and MQA into its radios. The latter is expensive to license and integrate, and I would argue that you won’t notice the higher quality on a compact speaker. Skiera tells me he “has not heard of any streaming radio stations migrating to those formats.”

A brief history of internet radio

Internet radio started out in the early 1990s as a hobbyist’s plaything, first cousin to “ham” shortwave radio. Then the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 imposed a burdensome royalty payment structure on any web-station with more than a couple hundred listeners. That buried a bunch of those basement startups. Today, only the stronger survive.

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While late to the party, almost every local broadcast station on earth (commercial and non) now has a simulcasting online stream. A great equalizer, internet radio turns a low-power community station loose on the world with almost the same weight as a 50,000-watt big-city blaster. (While it has broadcast with as little as 580 watts—and is now up to 13K directional—the Martha’s Vineyard adult alternative station WMVY has consistently placed among the Top 20 most listened-to internet stations, worldwide. Not too shabby.)

Internet radio simulcasts are also a lifeline to listeners in dense urban locations, where broadcast FM signals are fraught with multipath distortion. In my hood, the online versions of favorite locals like non-commercial alternative WXPN and jazz/classical WRTI sound as pristine as a CD, while the FM broadcasts sputter on my speakers like a worn vinyl record.

The ability to import distant signals has also proven a welcome development for displaced citizens—especially relocated sports fans who still want to follow their favorite teams with a distant web tune-in. Ditto with displaced foreigners who crave to hear their native tongue.

I happily connect with government-supported, ad-free stations in locations like Britain, Germany, and Denmark, because those outlets’ format choices are often far more liberated than you’d typically find on public stations in the U.S.. Yeah, Afro-pop, Reggae, Prog-rock, R&B, and Hip-Hop are in the public interest, too!

Pandora, Spotify et al are not internet radio

Some folks lump on-demand music services like Pandora and Spotify in their “best of internet radio” roundups. Yes, those services stream on the internet and are accessible on the same computers, phones, set-top boxes, and smart speakers. But to ex-radio broadcasters like Como Audio’s Skiera and myself (being a former programmer/presenter of FM free-form shows on WMMR and WYSP in Philadelphia), it’s anathema to slot a “music genome”-powered Pandora or an on-demand library like Spotify in the internet radio category. While those services do offer New Music Playlists and radio-format-like caches of music labeled “Alternative,” “Dance/Electronic,” “R&B,” “Soul/Funk,” and so on, services like those are can be more accurately described as online jukeboxes.

Satellite radio broadcaster SiriusXM’s channel lineup is likewise available in the U.S. (and expanded) on many streaming home devices, computers, and smartphones through an internet radio-styled portal. But even without the core car play, they aren’t giving it away. Depending on lineup size and bonus features, the 200-to-300 channel “at home” package will set you back $8 to $13 a month.

I hope I’ve piqued your interest in internet radio. In next week’s installment, I’ll show you how to find the kinds of music you like most, and I’ll share more of my personal picks—the stations I keep going back to.

Updated, April 27 to correctly identify the SiriusXM channel Siriusly Sinatra.

This is a Service Discovery LUA Script to TuneIn Radio for VLC 2.X.X and VLC 3.X.X

Screenshots

Download the latest release from: https://github.com/diegofn/TuneIn-Radio-VLC/archive/master.zip and uncompress it:

Linux: copy files to application directory:

if the destination directory does not exist, you can create using the command.

VLC 3.x.x and above (tested on VLC 3.0.8 using ElementaryOS 5.1.2 Hera)

Windows: open a Command Prompt as Administrator user and copy files to for x86_64 version of VLC or to if it exists

MacOS: you can copy files to local directory

MacOS: Alternatively, On MacOS you can copy files to folder to all users:

If you have an TuneIn user, you can modify the file in the username and password variables

Start your VLC

Click on ->

Enjoy!

• Update script for VLC 3.X.X.
• Minor fix on Title and Author columns thanks to @umpirsky
• Fix identation thanks to @hbkfabio

• Update image hosting
• "My presets" change for "Favorites" category
• Minor fix

• Change PartnerId to support flash based streaming
• Update image URL

• Bug fixed about TuneIn Password
• Added StreamTheWorld Support
• Added radiotime.com playlist support to navigate podcast, sports, etc tree.

• Add music menu
• Add custom icon for main categories
• Run plugin as a LUA Object

• This is the first version, My Presets and Local Radio working
• The LUA Script mapping the Categories and Location nodes

• Read the username and password for the Preferences Dialog, In progress
• Be accepted in VLC git ;)