Listening to radio from another country
Open the country you want, press play, and a station on the other side of the world starts in this tab.
No VPN is involved
A VPN moves where your connection appears to come from, and that only helps against something that is checking. A normal radio stream checks nothing. The broadcaster publishes one address, their server answers every request that arrives at it, and your browser holds that connection open and plays the audio as it arrives. There is no handshake anywhere in that in which your country comes up.
It is the arrangement that made shortwave interesting for a century, rebuilt on cheaper plumbing. A station in Beirut or Bogota is not broadcasting to you specifically. It is broadcasting, and on the internet everybody is within range.
The exception is real, and we do not defeat it
Some broadcasters fence a stream by territory, almost always because somebody sold them a right by territory: live sport, and a few music services. Their server refuses the connection, the player says the station is not answering, and it offers you the next one. We do not try to get around a geographic block, and a page promising we could would be selling something it cannot deliver.
Three ways to say which country you mean
By country is where the station transmits from, and every country with a dial deep enough to fill a page has a hub of its own. By language is what the station speaks, the axis that follows people rather than borders. By name is the search box at the top of the station directory, for when you already know what the station is called.
Most people arriving here want the second one. They are not looking for the radio of a country, they are looking for the radio of a childhood, and the country it broadcasts from is often not the one they picture. A language shelf shows where its stations actually transmit from, which is regularly several countries at once.
What decides whether you hear it
Two rules take more entries out of the public catalogue than anything else. A stream served over plain http will not open inside a secure page, because the browser blocks it. And the same stream address filed under several names is one station rather than three. Both are set out in full, with the reasoning, on how this directory is built.
The third thing is the station itself, and it is the commonest of all. Broadcasters run out of listener slots, restart an encoder, or move an address without telling anybody. There is a separate page on a stream that keeps cutting out which explains how to tell the difference in about thirty seconds.
Stations from around the world, playing here
Every country
People also ask
All answersCommon questions
- Do I need a VPN to listen to a radio station in another country?
- Almost never. A radio stream is an ordinary address on the broadcaster server, served to the public, and your browser fetches it the same way it fetches an image. Nothing in the chain asks where you are. The exception is the minority of broadcasters who deliberately fence a stream by territory, usually because a sports or music right was sold to them country by country. We do not try to get around that, and when it happens the player says the station is not answering rather than pretending otherwise.
- Is there a time difference problem? Will I get the same programme?
- You get exactly what is going out on air at that moment, which is the whole point and also the catch. A breakfast show in Mumbai is the middle of the night in London. Nothing here is on demand and nothing is recorded: live means live, so a station you loved in the evening sounds like a different station in the morning.
- How do I find a station if I know its name but not its country?
- Use the search box at the top of the station directory. It reaches every country page, every language shelf and the most listened to stations by name, and a station result plays where it stands. Anything it does not reach is one country page away.
- Why does my country have fewer stations here than I expected?
- We only count streams a browser can actually open, which means https only and one entry per stream. Around half of the entries in the public directory are http, and a browser blocks those inside a secure page, so listing them would mean listing stations nobody here could hear. A country with very few playable stations gets no hub at all rather than a page with two rows on it.
- Does listening from abroad cost the station money?
- It costs them bandwidth, which is why some stations cap how many listeners they serve at once and why a popular station sometimes refuses a new connection at peak time. It is also why we send you to the broadcaster's own stream rather than copying it: the listener count is theirs, and so is the decision to keep it open.
- Can I keep the station playing while I do something else?
- Yes. Audio continues in a background tab, and on Chrome the extension keeps playing even when the popup is closed and the tab that started it is gone. There is a whole page on that under Answers.
The world is already broadcasting
Every country with a dial deep enough to fill a page, free in this browser and free on Chrome, with no account anywhere in it.
This station would not play in your browser.