Why a radio stream keeps cutting out
Usually the broadcaster rather than your machine, and one ten second test tells you which.
Five places it can break, and only one is yours
Their encoder, first: when it restarts, everybody listening drops at the same instant and the station is back seconds later. Their stream host, second: it serves a fixed number of listeners at once and refuses new connections once they are gone, which is why a station can be impossible at nine in the evening and perfect at six in the morning. The route, third: a long haul connection crosses networks nobody in this chain controls, and it produces brief gaps that come and go over minutes.
Then your own network, which notices a flaky link precisely because a stream is one connection held open for hours. And last your browser, which is almost never at fault, and which announces itself by every station behaving identically badly.
What to try, in order
- Press play again, once. An encoder restart and a momentary route problem both clear on a second connection, and this solves more cases than everything below it put together.
- Play a different station, from a different country. This is the whole diagnosis in one step: a steady second station proves your connection, your browser and your machine are all fine.
- If every station stutters, turn off any VPN and try again, then check what else is using the connection. A large download or a video call interrupts a stream long before it interrupts a web page, because a stream has to arrive continuously and a page does not.
- Restart the browser. Last, not first, and only when the second station failed the same way, because by then you have evidence rather than a guess.
If nothing at all plays after that, write to us: that pattern is genuinely different from the ones above. The support page has the address and the details that make an answer possible.
What the player does when a station stops answering
It tells you, in a sentence, in amber. No error code, no red and no silent failure, and the reason is worth stating: a station being off air is a fact about the world rather than a fault in the software, and painting it red would be blaming the wrong thing.
A connection that has produced no audio in twelve seconds is called a failure, because a spinner that never resolves asks a listener to keep waiting for something that has already failed. Pressing the status line retries the stream once, and nothing retries in a loop behind your back.
When a station is not coming back
Stations close. A page here whose station has left the public catalogue keeps its address, loses its play button, says plainly that the stream has gone, and is marked so that search engines drop it. Somebody has already linked that address from a forum post or a bookmark, and answering it with an error would punish a reader for a broadcaster going off air.
If an entry is wrong rather than dead, the catalogue is an open community database and correcting it there fixes it everywhere, not only here. Broadcasters have their own page for corrections and removals.
People also ask
All answersCommon questions
- Why does my radio stream keep buffering or cutting out?
- In most cases the broadcaster's server, not your connection. A stream is one continuous connection to somebody else's machine, and it ends when they restart the encoder, run out of listener slots or change the address. The quickest test is a second station: if that one is steady, the problem was never on your side.
- How do I tell whether it is the station or my internet?
- Play a different station from a different country. If it holds, your connection is fine and the first station is the problem. If every station stutters the same way, the fault is closer to home, and the usual suspects are a saturated wifi link, a VPN, or something else on the network doing a large download.
- A station will not start at all in the evening but works in the morning.
- That is a full station. Broadcasters pay for a fixed number of simultaneous listeners and the server refuses new connections once they are gone. Nothing on your side will change it. Try again later, or find the same broadcaster second stream if they publish one.
- Why does the player give up after a few seconds instead of loading?
- Because a spinner that never resolves is the worst of the available lies. A connection that has produced no audio in twelve seconds is called a failure, the player says so plainly in amber, and it offers a retry. It never retries in a loop and it never blames you.
- Does a VPN help with a stuttering stream?
- Usually the opposite. A VPN adds a hop and a re-encryption step to a connection that is already long, and it is a common cause of gaps rather than a cure for them. Try the station with the VPN off before assuming the station is at fault.
- The station has gone off air permanently. Why does its page still exist?
- Because somebody has already linked to that address. A station that falls out of the directory keeps its page, loses its play button, says plainly that the stream has gone, and is marked so search engines drop it. Death is a status here rather than a deletion, and answering an old link with an error would punish the reader for a broadcaster going off air.
There is a lot of radio behind the one that failed
Every stream on this site is checked at build time for the two faults a browser will never forgive, and the next country is one press away.
This station would not play in your browser.