Guide
Why radio streams fail
Live internet radio fails more often than a hosted playlist. The encoder belongs to the station. AngryBeat does not hold a copy. This guide explains the usual failure modes, what our health score actually measures, and how to keep listening without treating every 404 as the site being down.
The stream is not on our servers
When you tap Play, your browser requests an HTTPS URL that the station (or its CDN) published to Radio Browser. We cache that URL locally so a directory outage does not wipe listings. We do not proxy the audio through AngryBeat. If the encoder is down, geo-blocked, serving HTTP-only, or using a codec the phone will not start, play fails in your browser — the homepage can still be healthy.
That split matters for uptime. The site health endpoint describes our cache and whether we can serve listings, not whether every third-party encoder on earth is up. A dead Lagos stream is not “AngryBeat is down.” It is radio.
Health scoring on this device
AngryBeat keeps a small health cache in this browser. A successful play raises a station’s score. Repeated failures drop it. After enough fails, or below a score threshold, we hide that card in listings so you are not tapping the same corpse. You can still open a station page and try again, and you can Report a problem if the metadata is wrong or the stream is permanently dead.
This score is not a public rating, not a “reliability percentage” we invented for ads, and not shared across devices. Another listener’s phone can have a different history. We also run periodic server-side probes in the background; those help the cache, they do not certify that a stream will start for you.
Player failover
If a stream errors or stalls, the player retries the same station once, then looks for a similar live station in the current list (same country or overlapping tags), up to a small cap. You will see a short notice when that happens. Failover is not a skip-to-next-song control. It is a way to stay on air when an encoder dies mid-hour.
Some failures are expected and are recorded as play metrics for operators. They are not sent to error tracking. Unexpected player bugs and Radio Browser sync failures can go to Sentry if that is configured. A 404 from a station is not a Sentry event.
What you can do
Try another card from the same country or genre. Check the station page facts: last directory check, codec, bitrate. Report a dead stream from the player or the card. Read how to listen live if you are new, or Station of the day if you only want one known-live worldwide pick.
Do not expect us to list an FM frequency we do not have. Do not expect a stream that blocks your country to magically start. The honest move is another live station. Languages and Genres are the other two maps if country is the wrong axis. Station pages exist so you can share one encoder instead of a search box.
FAQ
Usually not. Listings and the site health check describe our cache and pages. Individual encoders are third-party. Try another live card.
This browser hid it after repeated fails or a low health score. That suppression is local. Report a problem if you think the listing itself is wrong.
We cannot start someone else’s encoder. We can hide repeat failures, fail over once, and take an anonymous report. The operator has to bring the stream back.