Reference Audio Streams
These sample live audio streams are available for personal and commercial use, free of charge. These streams can be used for diagnosing player issues, quality assurance, comparing stream hosting providers, experimenting with different codecs, testing listening environments, and more. We are providing these as a service to the radio community, with the hope of improving the compatibility and interoperability within the streaming audio ecosystem.
All streams are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The streams feature a hand-picked selection of licensed, royalty-free music tracks, playing on shuffle.
| Name | URL | Bitrate (kbps) | Samplerate (Hz) | Channel Mode | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MP3 - 128K Stereo |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) Listen (HLS) |
128 |
44100 | Stereo | MPEG-1 Audio Layer III. Bit reservoir enabled. |
| MP3 - 128K Stereo, with Preroll |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) |
128 |
44100 | Stereo | Includes preroll. |
| AAC-LC - 128K Stereo |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) Listen (HLS) |
128 |
44100 | Stereo | All AAC streams are packetized as ADTS. |
| AAC-LC - 128K Stereo, with Preroll |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) |
128 |
44100 | Stereo | Includes preroll. |
| HE-AAC v1 - 64K Stereo |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) Listen (HLS) |
64 |
44100 | Stereo | Uses Spectral Band Replication (SBR) |
| HE-AAC v2 - 64K Stereo |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) Listen (HLS) |
64 |
44100 | Stereo | Uses SBR+PS. Stereo is synthesized by the Parametric Stereo (PS) feature in the HE-AAC v2 profile. |
| Ogg Vorbis - 64K Stereo |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) |
64 |
44100 | Stereo | |
| Ogg Opus - 64K Stereo |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) |
64 |
44100 | Stereo | |
| Ogg FLAC - Lossless Stereo |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) |
VBR |
44100 | Stereo | Sample format is 16-bit. Nominal bitrate is between 300 and 1500 kbps. |
| MP3 - 32K Mono Low Fi |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) Listen (HLS) |
32 |
44100 | Mono | |
| HE-AAC v1 - 24K Mono Low Fi |
Listen (HTTPS) Listen (HTTP) Listen (HLS) |
24 |
44100 | Mono |
Playlists
Playlists containing all these stream URLs are provided for convenience and can be loaded into a player such as VLC to speed up testing:
M3U Playlist - HTTPS M3U Playlist - HTTP M3U Playlist - HLSImplementation
Delivery
These streams are delivered by the Radio Mast Streaming Network, our global streaming audio CDN.
Production
All audio streams are playing identical music, powered by an upcoming product, and transcoded by Cloud Transcoder instances.
Monitoring
Our team monitors these streams for downtime and silence using Stream Monitoring.
HLS: HLS is available for MP3 and AAC (ADTS) streams. HLS segments are packaged as Packed Audio. Read more about HLS on Radio Mast.
Metadata: All HTTP and HTTPS streams contain ICY metadata, if played in a compatible player. For HLS, ID3 metadata is present in each segment and will appear in any player that supports it.
Protocol: Our HTTP and HTTPS streams use HTTP progressive download, which is the defacto standard for live streaming audio on the web. This protocol is used by popular streaming audio servers including RSAS, Icecast, SHOUTcast, and AIS. HLS is a separate protocol on top of HTTPS that Radio Mast also supports.
We'd Love to Hear From You
Using these streams for something cool? We'd love to hear about your project and how you're using these test streams.
Looking for a different kind of reference stream?