Most stations play an ad the moment you connect. ZapperRadio keeps your favorites streaming, muted, in the background, so tuning in is just turning the volume up.
Free and open source · Windows 10 or later · v1.18.0 · or download the installer
ZapperRadioAn ad plays when a stream starts. So ZapperRadio makes sure your streams have already started.
Add the stations you like with the + and drag them into the order you want.
Every favorite stays connected in the background. The pre-roll ad already played, on a stream you weren't listening to.
You're instantly live in the broadcast. No connecting, no buffering, no ad.
The catch: each favorite is a continuous stream of roughly 64 to 320 kbit/s. Twenty of them usually add up to about 2 to 4 Mbit/s, which is nothing on most home connections.
Because every favorite is already decoded, ZapperRadio can listen along with AI, right on your PC, and do things a normal radio player can't.
A neural network listens along to every favorite and hears when a station goes from music to an ad break or a presenter. ZapperRadio then jumps to a favorite that is playing a song, and returns when the music comes back. It also learns when each station has its news and ad slots, and passes over one whose break is about to start.
No more blasted ears when you zap to a loud station. Every favorite is measured the broadcast way (EBU R128) and levelled to about −14 LUFS.
Each favorite shows its current song, with an indicator for music, speech, an ad break or a broken stream.
Heart a track to keep it. The track history lists everything your favorites played in the last 12 hours, and one click finds it on Spotify or YouTube.
Search by name, genre or country. Typos are fine: radoi 538 still finds Radio 538, and popular stations of your country come first.
One click shrinks the player to just your favorites, sized to fit. Keep it in a corner and zap with a click.
ZapperRadio plugs into Windows, so it is there when you aren't looking at it.
ZapperRadio is translated into 30 languages, and starts in the one your Windows is set to.
Station names, countries, genres and song titles come from the station list and the stations themselves, so those stay as they are.
Free, open source and ready in a minute. .NET and everything else it needs is included.
Windows 10 (2004) or later · v1.18.0The installers are not digitally signed, so Windows may ask for confirmation the first time. All versions are on the releases page.
It avoids the ad you get when connecting to a stream, because your favorites are already connected. Ads in the middle of the broadcast are still there, but ZapperRadio recognizes them and can zap to another favorite that plays music until the break is over.
Each favorite is a continuous stream of roughly 64 to 320 kbit/s. Twenty favorites usually add up to about 2 to 4 Mbit/s, at most a little over 6. Stations you only browse are played on demand and stopped when you switch.
With AI that runs on your own PC: YAMNet, Google's open-source neural network for recognizing sounds, trained on about two million labelled clips. It listens to each stream every 5 seconds, in about 20 ms. Nothing is sent to the cloud: it uses the audio that is streamed anyway, so there is no account and no extra bandwidth.
30 of them, all listed in the section above, from English and Chinese to Arabic and Hindi. ZapperRadio starts in the first language of your Windows language list that it speaks, and in English when none of them is. You can pick another one in the settings. The installer itself is still English.
The station list has about 52,000 stations and is stored locally, so it also works offline. Popularity data comes from radio-browser.info.
The installer from GitHub is not digitally signed, which makes SmartScreen cautious about any new app. Get ZapperRadio from the Microsoft Store to skip the warning, or choose More info and then Run anyway. The complete source code is on GitHub if you want to check what you are installing.
Yes. ZapperRadio is open source under the MIT license.