Your lofi radio station, playing around the clock while you sleep

Why does a home-run lofi stream keep dropping?

Because it depends on one computer staying awake forever. Windows restarts for an update, the Wi-Fi blinks, the laptop lid gets closed, and your listeners hear nothing until you notice in the morning.

The fix is to stop streaming from home. With Auto DJ, our cloud radio automation, your songs sit on a Primcast server in Bucharest or New York along with your hour plans and your weekly schedule, and that is where your station plays from. You only sign in to upload music, change the plan or go live yourself.

Plan one hour, reuse it all week

An hour clock is a plan for sixty minutes of radio. Some items are pinned to an exact minute, so your station ID lands at :00 every time; the rest simply follow each other. A relaxed lofi hour could look like this:

1. :00, pinned: your station ID.
2. Six tracks from your main beats playlist.
3. A short jingle to mark the quarter.
4. Music again until the half hour.
5. :30, pinned: the station ID once more.
6. Mellow, slower tracks to the end of the hour.

Make a brighter clock for study hours and a sleepier one for late nights, then let the weekly schedule switch between them. Weekends can have their own, and a seasonal schedule can cover the holidays. Before you save, the week check points out overlaps, gaps and slots that would play nothing, and the last 50 versions of your programming are kept if you change your mind.

Will listeners hear the same beat twice in an hour?

Not if you give the rotation enough to work with. Auto DJ crossfades between songs, trims silence from the ends and keeps the same artist from playing back to back. In the US, though, the webcasting play rules go further, and Auto DJ can apply them for you: within a three-hour window, at most four songs by one artist and three from one album, with limits on how many run in a row.

That turns into a simple sum about how many producers you need. Short lofi tracks mean more plays per three hours, and more plays mean more names:

Treat those as the bare minimum and aim well above them. Space is seldom the problem: Premium gives you 20 GB for music and Platinum 100 GB, and you can upload MP3, AAC, Ogg, Opus, FLAC, WAV or AIFF straight from the browser.

What fills the silence when something goes wrong

• If a playlist has nothing left to play, a fallback playlist fills the gap.
• A file that turns out to be damaged is skipped when its turn comes, and the hour carries on.
• If the station ever goes quiet, you get an alert.
• When a DJ connects during their hours, Auto DJ hands over; when they sign off or lose their connection, the music comes back by itself.
• On Platinum, a backup encoder can step in first, and a standby slot covers the moments when no show is sending.

Your station streams over Shoutcast or Icecast; our Icecast hosting page shows how that part works.

The licensing side of nonstop music

Each song you play has two owners: whoever owns the recording, and whoever owns the composition. For US listeners, SoundExchange collects for recordings under a licence set by law, and ASCAP, BMI and SESAC collect for compositions. That applies even when your stream starts outside the US. To use the legal licence for recordings, you send the US Copyright Office a Notice of Use before your first broadcast. After that, the law asks a few things of how you program:

• Keep within the play limits: three songs from one album and four by one artist in any three hours, with no more than two and three of them consecutively.
• Do not post a list of which songs will play when.
• Do not loop a fixed-order program shorter than three hours. Shuffled rotation sidesteps this.
• Show each song's title, album and artist while it plays, not before.

Auto DJ keeps your rotation inside those play limits, takes a song out of rotation by itself when its rights end, and logs every play for your royalty reports. The licences themselves are still yours to arrange; our page on royalty fees for internet broadcasters walks through the main ones.

We are summarising US law and SoundExchange's own guidance here, not giving legal advice. If your producers licence their music to you directly, that agreement sets the terms.

How many listeners can a 24/7 stream carry?

Paid plans count listener hours: one person listening for one hour. A station that never stops uses them every hour of the day, so it helps to know what an all-day audience adds up to over a 31-day month of 744 hours:

If a month's hours run out, people already listening stay connected, and anyone new has to wait until the 1st of the next month; on Premium, moving up to Platinum raises the limit at once. You get an email at 80% and at 100%. Plans, sound quality and everything else are compared on our radio hosting page.

A link people can find and press play on

Your station's stream link is what you hand to radio directories and apps; SSL radio streaming explains why a secure link matters. From the radio panel's Share tab you can also give the station a public page of its own and ask to appear in our radio guide; our staff approve each listing before it goes public.

Getting your station running tonight

1. Choose Premium or Platinum; both come with 14 days free before the first charge.
2. Upload your music and file it into playlists: main beats, slower tracks, station IDs, jingles.
3. Draw a daytime clock and a late-night clock.
4. Place them on the weekly schedule and run the week check.
5. Switch on the US play rules if you have US listeners, and let the station play.

On the free plan you can only broadcast live: it has no music storage, so there is nothing for Auto DJ to play, and the stream stops when your encoder does.

Questions people ask

Do I need to leave my computer running?

No. Your music, clocks and schedule are kept on our servers, which play your station day and night. Your computer matters only when you want to go live yourself.

Is it fine to play the same playlist on repeat?

For US listeners, a fixed-order program played over and over has to be at least three hours long to stay within the legal licence for recordings. Shuffling with artists kept apart avoids that and keeps the station from sounding like a loop.

Can I put an 'up next' list on my website?

Showing what is playing right now is fine, and the US licence actually expects the title, album and artist to be shown during each song. What it does not allow is publishing ahead of time which specific songs will play when.

My station is not in the US. Do US royalties still apply?

If people in the US can listen, yes. SoundExchange says streams that reach US listeners fall under US law wherever they start, so you need either the legal licence or direct licences from the rights owners.

Can I go live now and then without breaking the automation?

Yes. Connect during your DJ hours and Auto DJ hands the air over; sign off and the music returns on its own. Premium includes 5 DJ logins and Platinum 20, each with its own hours.