How to stream your FM radio station online

To stream an FM station online you take a clean feed off the desk, process it separately from the transmitter chain, encode it on a machine that isn’t your studio PC, and point that encoder at a hosted stream. That’s the whole job in one sentence. The rest of this guide is the part most simulcast articles skip: which feed point, what processing, what levels, and what breaks at 3 a.m.

1. Why an established station bothers

Your transmitter draws a circle on a map. Everybody who moved out of that circle — for university, for a job, for a marriage, for a war — is still your audience, and right now they have no way to hear you. That’s the entire commercial case for a simulcast, and it doesn’t require any theory about the future of radio. It’s people who already chose your station and simply moved.

Two things follow that FM cannot give you. First, measurement. FM tells you a coverage contour and whatever a diary panel guesses; a stream tells you how many people were connected at 07:14, which country they were in, and — the number that actually changes programming decisions — how long they stayed. If your 3 p.m. show loses a third of its listeners in the first eight minutes, listener analytics will tell you that and the ratings book never will.

Second, a second life for the archive. Interviews, features, the local election debate: on FM they aired once and died. Recorded off the same chain and published as a podcast feed, they keep earning attention for years. That’s covered in recording shows and publishing a podcast.

2. The audio chain: where to take the feed

This is the decision that determines how your station sounds online, and it’s made once, usually in a hurry, usually wrong. Feed points in order of preference:

The off-air tuner is popular because it takes ten minutes and needs no cooperation from anyone. It is also the worst-sounding option available, for reasons that compound: you have added pre-emphasis and de-emphasis, multipath, the tuner’s blend-to-mono behaviour on weak signal, its own AGC, and — if the site ever goes down — a stream that faithfully broadcasts silence or, worse, static. A tuner feed also means your stream dies whenever your transmitter dies, which throws away one of the main benefits of having a stream at all.

The processing trap

Here is the single most common technical mistake in a simulcast. FM processing exists to fight a hostile medium: pre-emphasis, a hard deviation limit, noise, and competitors who are all as loud as the law allows. So it clips. Aggressively, deliberately, and in ways that are broadly inaudible over an FM receiver in a car.

A lossy codec then meets that signal and has a very bad time. Clipping generates high-frequency energy and raises the average level to a near-constant, which is precisely the material that costs the most bits to encode. The encoder spends its budget on distortion products instead of on music, and the result — harsh, grainy, swirly on cymbals and applause — is what listeners describe as "the stream sounds worse than the radio". It does, and the codec is not really the culprit.

The right answer is a separate, lighter processing path for the stream. Take the clean feed, apply gentle AGC for consistency between an over-compressed 1980s master and a modern one, mild multiband to hold your station’s tonal signature, and a limiter set to catch peaks rather than to manufacture loudness. No clipper. Many modern processors give you a second output with an independent streaming preset for exactly this reason; if yours does, use it, and don’t just copy the FM preset across.

Mono or stereo

Stereo is not free: joint stereo helps, but at low bitrates the codec is still dividing a fixed budget across two channels. For a speech-led AM or community station, mono at a given bitrate will beat stereo at the same bitrate every time, and most of the audience is listening on a phone speaker or a single earbud anyway. For a music FM, keep stereo and pay for it with bitrate. Do not send an artificially widened signal to the encoder — stereo enhancement is another thing that eats bits.

3. Getting the feed into a computer

Your plant runs balanced analogue on XLR or AES/EBU on 110-ohm cable. Your encoding machine has a consumer sound card, or nothing at all. Bridging those two worlds properly is worth doing once, correctly.

• Use a real audio interface, not the motherboard input. A studio-grade USB interface with balanced inputs — or an AES/EBU input if you can feed it digitally — costs less than a day of engineering time and removes an entire category of problems: noisy converters, unbalanced inputs picking up the building, and consumer line levels that don’t match a broadcast plant.
• Go digital where you can. If the desk or processor has an AES/EBU or a network audio output, taking it digitally skips two conversions and every analogue-domain problem below.
• Match levels deliberately. Broadcast gear runs at +4 dBu; a lot of computer inputs expect −10 dBV. Getting this wrong gives you either a distorted feed or one so quiet you claw the gain back later and bring the noise floor with it. Set it with a tone from the desk, not by ear on a song.
• Lock the sample rate. Run the interface at the same rate as everything else feeding it and don’t leave the operating system resampling in the background. Rate mismatches produce slow drift and periodic clicks that are miserable to diagnose weeks later.

4. Encoder and codec settings

Nobex accepts any Icecast-compatible encoder, so whatever your plant already uses will connect: a hardware streaming encoder, or software like OBS, BUTT, Mixxx or Virtual DJ. Connection details and per-app setup are in the desktop agent and DJ software guide.

On codec choice: AAC is meaningfully better than MP3 per bit, especially below 128 kbps, and every phone, browser and smart speaker made this decade decodes it. MP3’s remaining advantage is compatibility with very old hardware players and a handful of legacy directory integrations. Bandwidth in the table is per listener-hour, which is the number that actually determines what a simulcast costs you.

Two practical notes. First, resist the urge to run one very high bitrate "because we can" — most of your audience is mobile, and a stream that stutters at 320 kbps is worse than one that never stutters at 128. Second, encode once. If your feed has already been through a codec somewhere upstream, you’re stacking artefacts. The bitrate ceiling on Nobex plans is 128, 256 and 320 kbps on Starter, Pro and Business respectively; stream quality and delivery covers how the CDN handles the rest.

5. Reliability: the stream must outlive the studio PC

A hobby stream stops when a laptop sleeps. A broadcast stream cannot, because the audience you’re building online will judge you by the same standard they judge your transmitter by — and they won’t email you about the outage, they’ll just stop coming back.

1. 1Give the encoder its own machine. A small dedicated PC or a hardware encoder that does one job, doesn’t get Windows updates at 03:00, and isn’t the box a presenter uses to check email. It should boot straight into the encoder and reconnect automatically without anyone logging in.
2. 2Put it on the UPS, on the same protected supply as the desk and the automation system. A stream that survives everything except a brownout has not been engineered.
3. 3Set the encoder to reconnect on its own, with a short retry interval. Then test it by pulling the network cable, not by assuming.
4. 4Monitor the stream separately from the transmitter. Your existing silence sensor watches the air chain and will happily report all-clear while the stream has been dead for six hours. Monitor the actual public stream URL, from outside the building, and alert on silence as well as on disconnection.
5. 5Decide what listeners hear when the feed drops. This is the part people leave until it happens.

On that last point: Nobex’s Cloud AutoDJ takes over instantly if the live feed stops, so a dropped encoder means your listeners hear programming from your uploaded library rather than silence or a dead player. Upload an evergreen rotation — music, station idents, best-of features — and a studio outage becomes an inconvenience for you rather than an event for the audience. AutoDJ also enforces the US sound-recording performance complement on automated playout, so the fallback stays inside webcasting rules rather than quietly creating a problem.

6. Metadata: what your automation owes the stream

On FM, RDS shows eight characters at a time and nobody built a business on it. Online, now-playing metadata is the interface: it’s what appears on a car head unit over CarPlay or Android Auto, on a phone lock screen, on the listener’s watch, in directory listings, and next to the "add to playlist" button that turns a passive listener into someone who remembers your station’s name.

Most playout systems can already do this — they emit now-playing over HTTP, a serial or TCP feed, or a file on disk that something else watches. Point it at the now-playing metadata API and the stream, the public page and the directories all update together. Two engineering details worth getting right: send an update on every element change including idents and ads (an empty or stale title looks broken), and strip your automation’s internal cart numbers and category codes before they reach the public, because they will otherwise appear on somebody’s dashboard screen.

The same metadata stream is also your reporting substrate. Accurate, timestamped play logs are what a royalty return is built from, and reconstructing them after the fact is far harder than logging them correctly from day one — see metadata and royalties.

7. Rights: your FM licence does not cover the internet

This surprises station managers more than anything else on this page. Broadcasting and internet transmission are separate rights, licensed separately, usually by the same societies under a different agreement. Holding a transmitter licence and a broadcast blanket licence does not entitle you to put the same audio on a public stream.

The reason is territorial. Your transmitter’s reach is a physical fact that a licence can be scoped to. A stream has no contour at all — it is available in every country simultaneously, which is exactly what makes it valuable and exactly what makes the rights question harder. Add to that the recorded-music side: many territories treat webcasting under a distinct rate structure with its own reporting obligations, which is why the play logs above matter.

The ownership point is the one to hold on to. A licence bundled by a hosting provider sits in that provider’s name and is scoped to their territories — it does not travel with you if you leave. A licence in your own station’s name is an asset of the station, like your transmitter licence. For an established broadcaster with a callsign worth protecting, that distinction is not academic. Hosting and licensing are separate purchases; Nobex keeps automated playout inside the statutory playout rules but does not supply licences or legal advice. The detail lives in internet radio licensing and how to get a music licence.

8. The commercial break decision

Here’s an operational question almost no simulcast guide raises, and it will land on your sales director’s desk in month two. Your FM inventory was sold on a local market. Once you simulcast, some of those spots play to a listener four thousand kilometres away who cannot visit the advertiser’s shop.

• Pass the breaks through unchanged. Simplest, and honest as long as your rate card doesn’t claim online listeners are part of the local buy. Small stations mostly start here.
• Replace the breaks online with station promos, sponsor spots sold to the diaspora audience, or evergreen features. More work, and it needs your playout system to fire a switch on break start — but it turns unsold impressions into inventory.
• Sell the online audience separately. Once your analytics show a real, measurable audience in specific places, that’s a different product with a different rate card. It is also the version that pays for the streaming line item.

Whichever you pick, decide it deliberately and write it into the rate card, because the failure mode is billing a local advertiser for reach they can’t use. Nobex includes sponsor spots, tips and memberships on every plan with Stripe and PayPal payouts — monetization covers how stations combine those with traditional spot sales.

9. Getting the stream in front of people

A stream URL nobody has is a private hobby. Your existing FM brand is an enormous advantage here — people are actively searching for your callsign — so the work is making sure that search ends somewhere that plays audio.

• Directories. TuneIn, Alexa and the aggregators are where "play [your station]" resolves. They don’t charge stations to be listed, and correct metadata is what makes your entry look maintained rather than abandoned. See getting your station on Alexa.
• Smart speakers, which are the actual replacement for the kitchen radio your audience has been listening to for twenty years. This is the highest-value placement for a heritage station and the one most often left half-configured.
• The car, which is where FM still wins and where you need to be present through CarPlay and Android Auto — which is downstream of getting the metadata right.
• Your own page and player, embedded on the site your listeners already visit for the schedule, so nobody has to install anything. Covered in the public page and embedding guide.

The full checklist across phones, browsers, speakers and dashboards is in getting your radio station on every device.

10. Simulcast questions, answered