Live Radio Stations on the Globe

All active radio stations are fetched from the Radio-Browser community API, which aggregates 26,000+ internet radio stations from 246 countries. Station records include stream URL, name, country, language, tags, codec, bitrate, and vote count.

Station coordinates from the API are validated and enriched. Stations with missing or imprecise coordinates are resolved using country centroid fallback, then jittered slightly to prevent exact coordinate stacking for dense countries like Germany and USA.

Free-text genre tags from Radio-Browser are normalized into canonical genre buckets (Pop, Rock, Jazz, Classical, News, Talk, Electronic, World) using a keyword matching dictionary. Language codes are mapped to ISO 639-1 for consistent filtering.

A periodic server-side health checker performs HEAD requests on stream URLs to detect dead or redirected streams. Stations with failed health checks are flagged with reduced confidence scores and visually de-emphasized on the globe.

Station density per country is computed and used to generate heatmap overlay data at the country level. High-density clusters (Germany: 3,000+, USA: 8,000+) are progressively disclosed at zoom levels to avoid overplotting on the globe.

Station dots are rendered on a globe.gl WebGL globe with color coding by genre and size scaling by vote count / listener popularity. Click any station to load the live audio stream via HTML5 Audio API with instant one-click playback.