Naim Internet Radio - Feedback & Requests - Part 21

A repeat of the opening post from Part 1:

At Naim, we understand that while many people use our products to get the best listening experience from their own music collection; sometimes you simply want to put the radio on and let someone else choose. We’ve offered a comprehensive internet radio solution for some time, and we are now delighted to announce the launch of our own in-house internet radio solution.

In a collaboration between XPeri and our team here at Naim, we have brought the internet radio server in-house to be maintained internally, as opposed to relying on a third party as with the previous server. This will improve reliability and has opened up a host of improvements to the service, detailed below:

- A selection of over 45,000 stations worldwide
- Advanced metadata feeds for artist, track and album info on many stations
- Focus on high-quality audio streams
- Improved station categorisation
- High-resolution station artwork
- Automated station scanning
- Station podcasts (where available)

The Focal & Naim app will identify any favourites and presets that should be resaved to use the new server.

These updates are not only improving the internet radio server but improving our streaming capabilities too. TIDAL’s new 24-bit, 192 kHz streaming tier, TIDAL Max, is now available through both the Focal & Naim app and TIDAL Connect.

In a significant update for our Chinese customers, Q-Play is now supported in Naim products. QQ Music is one of the largest music streaming services in China, and users are now able to select their Naim streamer from within the QQ Music app for a seamless listening experience.

Regards,
Naim Audio – Software team

With the launch of Naim’s new Internet Radio service (see above), I’ve created this dedicated thread where information can be posted relating to the service and members can post feedback and requests for the team at HQ.

Examples of how this thread can be used;

  • Announcements on key new stations / station rebrands etc. For example recently a big change in UK for Bauer Media and Global. Scala radio rebrands to Magic Classical and about 16 other new or existing stations changing.
  • request stations that we don’t have.
  • issues with a station. Eg, wrong meta / won’t play and so on.
  • notifications of any downtime on either our system in a given region, or a dependent system like the xperi live radio meta.
  • Search issues. We have the station but its hard to find as needs more tags.
  • feature requests / feedback / general radio gossip

Please ensure posts here are ONLY feedback re. the new Naim radio service or station requests. Thanks.

The latest July Update can be read here:

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Still very happy with the radio function thanks @Stevesky

My feature request is to offer a “by date” sorting category in the Podcasts section, or an expanded view of metadata. When you drill into a multi-episode podcast and hit the list, it’s difficult or impossible on iPhone app to figure out which episode is the newest one. In general, a little love on podcast view would go a long way to upgrade the UX I think! Thanks!!

Hi @alan33

The server side sorts the podcadt epusodes by date by default. So latest at the top. Example:

What i think tge problem is that the app A-Z force sort is enabled and hence they are then all jumbled up, Red arrow in screenshot above shows how to disable it.

Will discuss with the app teams leader on this one as agree it’s a bit thin on meta.
Best

Steve

Ok great! Thanks for fast reply… I definitely had the A-Z sort on, possibly with a vague feeling that toggle wasn’t there in the past (that’s on me). More meta data would be super helpful - date, whatever. The episode titles now show only in the “…” expanded view but don’t side-scroll in the list. I previously found the “…” hard to select without accidentally selecting the episode to start playing. Maybe I should also switch the toggle to press and hold for more info instead of instant play, but i don’t really know. Anyway, great to get a bit of attention on UI from team, much appreciated!!

Radio Paradise Mellow Mix went down here (UK) a few minutes ago, both AAC and HD streams.

Other RP stations OK. Mellow Mix from RP app also working normally.

Up and running again now, but playing different tracks to the RP app.

Hi Chris,

Re: Radio Paradise Mellow

That was a failure on their servers, nothing we could do Naim directory side as their server broadcasting the stream failed.

Regarding sync of what’s playing, this is an ongoing issue at Radio Paradise but having checked it around 21:00 it’s currently in sync. Example:

Regards

Steve

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Yes, all back to normal here. Even the metadata is correct and in sync, which it generally hasn’t been for a while now.

Has anyone else lost Les Inrocks? I just went to it today, and it’s saying station unavailable. May be on their side, but just wanted to check.

Hi @Maury_Finkle

Re: Les inRocks

Can’t see any down time on this station recorded on the station scanner and plays ok from UK. The provider they use are a renown reliable one.

Best

Steve

Could KITS and KJZY be added to the list. Thanks, Jeff.

Thx Steve - back up and running this am. May have been a connection issue my side.

@Stevesky City Radio (Chile) in the Hidef section is not working anymore. Any idea what happened?

Hi @whatu1tme2b

Re: Radio City

it’s been down on their side since 24th June. Both stations on their website are off-line.

Currently can’t find any evidence if they have shutdown, or just an extended technical difficulty.

Our directory policy is that we keep them for 3 month and if after then it’s still abandoned with no clue on the future of it then we delete it.

Best

Steve

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Hi @Jeffbo

KITS - that is rebranded at Live 105. It’s here:

It can also be found by searching for ‘KITS’ as well.

KJZY - that one is slightly more tricky as it’s been moving around and mutated as a different station that rebranded and changed frequency. It was a country station, now a Jazz station,but we sorted it out a few weeks ago. I’ve now tagged it with its original callsign so can be picked up with the search engine.

Best

Steve

The public radio station „You FM“ of HR in Germany recently merged with „DASDING“ of SWR and both changed their names to „DASDING vom hr“ and „DASDING vom SWR“. The URLs stay unchanged. Please change the names and logos.

By the way, I am wondering how you process those daily changes and if it wouldn’t be a good idea to make this more of a community project and let the community update the information, potentially with a Quality Assurance by Naim.

Hi @Joamato

Thanks for the update on this. System is now updated, apart from the new Dasding vom SR which we need to check out what the deal is there. From looking at the SPI feed from SR they have assigned a new stream URL so we’ve updated to that so it doesn’t break in the future.

Regarding the internal process, we get directory feeds from Xperi/Tivo, direct from various broadcasters, various industry standard SPI’s (Service and Programme Information) for different regions and markets. As errors are often seen in these feeds we manually check all and selective pick what we put in to our directory. For example, many will consider a station “dead” if they no longer broadcast on DAB or FM, but can be still alive on the internet.

At the moment we don’t have plans to make it community driven. We have quite a few licensing and NDA agreements in place with broadcasters and it will make it hard to comply if we start having non employees having access to it. That is why we do easy feedback via forums like this so we can quickly correct any issues that we haven’t done already. As you can see from this thread in practice we don’t get that much feedback per month so the system is pretty much under control. The more time consuming is analyzing proposed new stations to decide if they are real stations or not. There are a lot of pirate, clone stations (they claim to be a popular broadcaster but are not and are begging for money), or stations that are a method to encourage end users to visit a site with viruses on, or malformed streams taking advantage of known vulnerabilities in various streaming software.

Best

Steve

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Hi Steve,

Thanks a lot for your quick response and the explanation on the handling of station changes. Excellent customer service as usual.

I can already see the changed name but not yet the new logo. Regarding SR, „Unser Ding“ has also been merged into DASDING and is now named „DASDING vom SR“.

Cheers,

Joachim

Hi @Joamato

The logo was changed on the backend ayatem but it typically takes 2days to trickle through Cloudflare CDN caches and then app image caches.

Here is a pic of the station entry now:

Best

Steve

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