Station playlists

What a subscribed playlist is, how it behaves in your library, and where they come from.

A station playlist is a list of live streams — radio or TV — that lives at an address somewhere and is re-read rather than downloaded once. Subscribing to one puts every station in it into your library as something you can play.

They behave differently from a podcast in one way that matters: a station has no episodes. There is nothing to download and nothing to keep; there is whatever is being broadcast when you press play.

Where they come from

Add from providers, on the Add subscription screen, is where you browse playlists kept somewhere else. A provider is somewhere playlists are kept — you open it, look through its folders and subscribe to the ones you want.

There are two, and both are yours to point at — neither has anything in it until you do:

• Your own catalogue — any public Github directory of m3u playlists
• m3ugoat — a playlist server you run yourself

By address

If you already have the address of one playlist, Add a playlist by address — An m3u of stations, kept up to date — takes it directly. It opens Add a playlist of stations, which says what will happen: It is kept as a subscription, and shows under Providers. It asks for a Playlist address and a Name (optional), and Subscribe adds it.

A single station is Add a stream by address instead — see Adding by address.

In the library

Subscribed playlists are filed under Subscriptions, on the Providers chip — kept apart from podcasts so a station list does not sit in a grid of show artwork with nothing to show.

The folder a playlist came out of becomes part of its name. A repository that holds countries/uk, categories/uk and languages/uk would otherwise give you three library rows all called the same thing.