Hi all,
Happy new year and wishing everyone a great 2025.
OK, festivities over, lets get down to the serious business of internet radio 
What’s new:
Improved South Korea country view - South Korea is a tricky country for internet radio as a large majority of the stations are locked behind API’s to access them and secure token keys. As of late December the following radio networks are far better:
- KBS (national broadcaster) - full regional network of stations now mapped into the system.
- KBS World reflects the restructure made in December. One station is missing (KBS World Music) due to an API issue.
- SBS network is now complete
- KBN added, including the news channel.
- MBC - full network added.
- FEBC - full regional network added.
- TBS - full regional network added
- WBS - full regional network added
- About 20 regional community and misc. shopping / news channels.
Improved sync of station format stored in the database
When browsing the radio directory the format and bitrate of the station is a cached value that is calculated by the system when scanning if stations are working or not. This engine has been improved to handle HLS streams better that can have multiple streams in one container, all of different bit rates. There is also better logic implemented to handle some of the corner cases that some stations introduce.
General stats:
317 new stations added, 948 existing stations modified (stream URL’s have gone invalid, rebrands etc), and 520 stations shut down so were deleted.
Busiest days was unsurprisingly Christmas day, where during the day where we processed over 4.2million radio API transactions. System all running smooth and no loading issues.
Promoted station of the month
Due to Christmas we haven’t had chance to sort something out this month, but our old faithful’s JazzGroove (https://jazzgroove.org) and 2XS Radio (https://2xsradio.com/) are still running and providing superior quality streams than other radio directories can deliver. Check them out!
What’s coming up?
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We are focusing on switching older products to the new system. Hopefully that will be done in the next 2 months or so. It’s quite complicated due to the age of the products and various backend software tools need updating / are no longer compatible with modern operating systems. We’re almost there on getting something out to beta.
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Popular stations views - for last 3 months we’ve been allowing the backend to accumulate stats. In February we’ll start auto updating this view for each country to reflect reality.
Radio related fixes in Decembers software service pack (3.10.1, 4.4.1)
We don’t normally publish detailed release notes, but based on you’ve got this far on reading this update, it indicates you have a reasonable interest in internet radio.
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Broken ipv6 resolution on a few radio stations - Some radio stations like Alfred, UK when looked up (DNS wise) return ipv4 and ipv6 addresses. If the ipv6 is used a dead http stream is returned. We now priorities ipv4 to work around this problem that comes from a server side misconfiguration.
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Increased buffering. We now prebuffer at least 6seconds of the live radio stream before starting playback, rather than 3. Some customers had issues with dropouts based on the increased data rates (better quality) used in the new system and inoptimal networking situations. This change can mean that time to play can increase for some stations that don’t buffer much server side. The User Interface/API’s now update quicker to show the station planning to be played to help the user experience.
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Handling of super short HLS fragments - German stations like ‘hr’ have higher quality HLS streams but chop the stream into 2second fragments. The spec recommends at least 6seconds. This caused algorithm issues in the HLS code and resulted in intermittent dropouts. Now fixed.
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Work around for some non compliant Ogg/FLAC streams. Lossless streams like Futura FM, have malformed bitstream in them. We’ve applied workaround to make them play properly.
That’s all folks. Have a great year and as ever, any questions / issues or the like report them in the Radio support thread, or direct to our support desk.
Best wishes
Steve Harris
Software Director
Naim Audio Ltd.