Online radio fails in a small number of recognisable ways, and the useful first question is always the same: is it the station, the path between you and the station, or your own device? You can usually tell in under a minute.
The thirty-second test
Open a second station on this site — ideally one from a different broadcaster. If that plays cleanly, the problem is specific to the first station and there is nothing wrong with your connection. If everything stutters, the problem is at your end or on your network.
That one test separates the two halves of this article, and it saves a lot of pointless router-restarting.
What you can fix
1. You are on a weak mobile signal
Audio streaming is unusually sensitive to jitter — variation in packet timing — rather than raw speed. This is why a stream can stutter on a connection that shows three bars and downloads a web page instantly. Moving from a moving vehicle to a stationary one, or from a basement to a window, does more than anything else on this list.
If you are frequently on a marginal signal, pick a lower-bitrate stream. There is less to deliver per second, so there is less to go wrong. Stations offering a lighter stream are tagged Low data on their cards here, and the player's Data Saver switch selects the lowest-bitrate option a station publishes.
2. Your browser has suspended the tab
Phone browsers aggressively suspend background tabs to save battery. If audio stops a minute or two after you switch to another app, this is usually why, and it is not a fault in the stream.
The fix is to install this site to your home screen. An installed web app gets background audio and lock-screen controls, which a browser tab does not reliably get. The install page has the steps for Android, iPhone and Huawei — it takes two taps and downloads less than a photo.
3. Something on your network is interfering
Corporate and school networks sometimes block the ports that radio streams use. Many stations broadcast on non-standard ports rather than the usual web ports, and a restrictive firewall will let you load this page perfectly while silently refusing the audio. If a station works on mobile data but not on an office network, that is what you are looking at, and only that network's administrator can change it.
Some ad blockers and privacy extensions also block streaming hosts. If a stream fails in your normal browser but works in a private window, try disabling extensions for this site.
What you cannot fix
4. The broadcaster's stream is genuinely down
Stations go off for maintenance, run out of server capacity during a big sports fixture, or change their stream address without telling anybody. Community stations in particular run on modest infrastructure and modest budgets, and an outage of a few hours is normal rather than alarming.
We check every stream in this directory on a schedule and mark a station inactive only after it has failed repeatedly — never on a single failure, because one failed check usually says more about the checking than the station. If a station here is live and will not play for you, the odds favour something on this list rather than a dead stream.
5. The station changed its stream and has not told anyone
This is the commonest reason a station that worked last month does not work today. Broadcasters move between providers and the old address quietly stops resolving. Where a station publishes more than one stream we keep the alternates and fall back to them automatically, which covers a lot of these silently.
When it does not, telling us is genuinely useful — use the contact page and we will check it against the broadcaster's own site.
A note on what "buffering" actually is
Your player deliberately downloads a few seconds ahead of what you are hearing, so that a brief interruption is invisible. Buffering is that reserve being rebuilt after it ran out. It is not a bug — it is the mechanism that hides most problems from you, and you only see it when the problem is bigger than the reserve.
This is also why a stream can be perfectly fine and still start slowly. The player is filling the buffer before it makes a sound. A few seconds of silence at the start is normal; a few seconds of silence every minute is not.
If it is the data you are worried about
Radio uses far less than people assume — a talk stream at 64 kbps is about 28 MB an hour — but on a capped bundle it is worth knowing the numbers. Our guide to how much data online radio uses has the full table by bitrate, and every station page here shows that station's rate and its cost per hour.