Zenzel Radio

Discover internet radio stations from Radio Browser and public GitHub playlists without leaving VS Code.

What you can do

• Browse stations by music style, news, talk, sports, country, and region.
• Search the worldwide Radio Browser directory by station, city, country, or genre.
• Find nearby stations by entering coordinates and a search radius.
• Play a station and keep working in VS Code.
• Star any station to save it as a favorite. Favorites persist across sessions and windows, and the Favorites button filters the list down to them.
• Page through large results with a per-page size, and keep the playing station selected while you filter, page, or search.
• See where every station came from, including its repository, playlist, license, and pinned revision.
• Open a station’s official website or its source repository.
• Add public GitHub playlists when you want a more specialized collection.
• Browse broad genre and era collections, including pop, rock, country, folk, jazz, blues, classical, electronic, ambient, metal, reggae, soul, hip-hop, oldies, decades, news, talk, sports, community, public radio, world, holiday, and more.

Getting started

1. Open the Command Palette with Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P on macOS).
2. Run Zenzel Radio: Refresh GitHub Sources to load the curated collection.
3. Search or filter for a station.
4. Select a station to play it.

For local discovery, run Zenzel Radio: Find Local Stations and enter latitude,longitude,radius, for example 40.7128,-74.0060,50. The radius is in kilometers. Radio Browser’s location data is community supplied, so some local broadcasters may not have coordinates yet.

The curated GitHub collection is provided by deroverda/recommended-radio-streams under CC0-1.0. Station names and streams remain the property of their respective broadcasters.

Sources

Use these commands from the Command Palette:

• Refresh GitHub Sources — check enabled sources for updates.
• Import GitHub Source — add a public repository containing a supported playlist.
• Manage Sources — view enabled sources and their station counts.
• Manage Sources — enable or disable the curated and optional playlist collections.
• Open Source Repository — visit the repository behind an imported station.

The built-in Junguler radio collection tracks junguler/m3u-radio-music-playlists on its main branch and refreshes the upstream ---everything-lite.m3u playlist. The upstream repository does not declare a license; station rights and stream availability remain the responsibility of their respective owners.

GitHub sources refresh at most once per day by default. The last valid collection remains available if GitHub or a source is temporarily offline. Optional sources without a declared license require explicit user activation and are never bundled with the extension.

Privacy and safety

Zenzel Radio does not require an account. It requests only public GitHub metadata and playlist files when you refresh a source. Repository code, scripts, web pages, and workflows are never executed. Imported entries are accepted only when their stream URL uses HTTP or HTTPS and contains no credentials.

Entries that resolve to a web page rather than audio — a text/html codec or content type, or a URL ending in a page extension such as .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp, .shtml, or .cgi — are filtered out of every source, so they never appear in the station list.

Some broadcasters provide HTTP-only streams or formats that VS Code cannot play. These may require an explicit HTTP setting or an external player. Availability can change because streams are operated by third parties.

Troubleshooting

If a station does not play, try another stream from the same station, refresh its source, or open the broadcaster’s website. For source problems, check that the repository is public, contains a supported M3U/M3U8, JSON, CSV, or Markdown playlist, and has not exceeded the configured station limit.

To change refresh behavior and source policy, open Settings and search for Zenzel Radio.

License

Zenzel Radio is distributed under the MIT License. Third-party stations, logos, playlist contents, and repository materials retain their original ownership and licenses.

Station and player icons are Font Awesome 7 Free by Fonticons, Inc., used under CC BY 4.0. The artwork is extracted into src/icons.ts by npm run icons (after npm install), so no Font Awesome code ships at runtime.

The extension is authored by Christopher Zenzel. Versioned releases are created when a v*.*.* tag is pushed.