Radio Player Proxy 1.0.0

A Radio Player Proxy is a specialized tool, often provided as an add-on for a radio player plugin (like the "Radio Player Proxy Add-on" for the "Radio Player" plugin in WordPress), designed to solve common compatibility and security issues when embedding live audio streams on a website.

It acts as an intermediary server that fetches the radio stream and then re-delivers it to your website's player.

Here are the two primary functions of a Radio Player Proxy:

1. 🛡️ Solving Mixed Content (HTTP on HTTPS)

This is the most critical function in modern web browsing:

The Problem: Today, nearly all websites use HTTPS (SSL/TLS encryption) for security. However, many older or smaller radio streams still broadcast audio over unencrypted HTTP. When you try to embed an unencrypted HTTP stream on a secure HTTPS website, modern browsers (like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) block it entirely as "mixed content." The player simply won't work.

The Proxy Solution: The radio player proxy acts as a bridge:

The proxy server connects to the original HTTP stream URL.

It then wraps the audio data and delivers it to your website's player using a secure HTTPS connection.

This satisfies the browser's security requirements, and the audio stream plays successfully.

2. 🎶 Fixing Metadata and CORS Issues

The proxy can also enhance the user experience by stabilizing the stream data:

Metadata Fix: Radio streams often transmit song information (title, artist, artwork) in a specific, sometimes unreliable, format. If your website's server struggles to retrieve this data, the proxy server can be used to reliably fetch, process, and deliver the song metadata to the player.

CORS Bypass: Proxies can often bypass Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) issues. CORS is a browser security measure that prevents a script on one domain (your website) from accessing data from another domain (the radio stream server). By using a proxy on your own domain or a trusted external server, the CORS restrictions are eliminated.

In summary, if you have a website secured with HTTPS and you need to play an older or non-SSL radio stream, the Radio Player Proxy is necessary to ensure the stream works reliably across all modern browsers.

Would you like to know more about the setup process for using an external VPS (Virtual Private Server) as a proxy, which is sometimes required for very heavy streaming traffic?