· 3 min read
What we deliberately left out of the web player
Recording, the equalizer, and Chromecast are all in the Android app and none are here. In each case the web version would have worked for some stations and not others.
The Android app can record a stream, apply an equalizer, and cast to a speaker. The web player does none of those, and the reason is the same for all three.
Inconsistent is worse than absent
Browsers restrict what a site can do with audio it did not serve itself. Reading the waveform, applying an equalizer, or capturing a recording all require permissions that a station has to grant — and almost no community radio station does.
The result would be an equalizer that works on some stations and silently does nothing on others, with no way for you to tell which in advance. A control that works a third of the time is worse than no control, because it teaches you not to trust the interface.
The waveform you can see
The station page does show a waveform, and it is decorative. It moves while audio is playing and rests when it is not, so it tells you something true about the transport — but its shape is not your audio, and we do not claim otherwise.
What that leaves
The web player does the things a browser genuinely does well: instant access with nothing to install, real lock-screen and hardware-key controls, a library saved on your device, and a sleep timer that survives a backgrounded tab. For recording and the equalizer, the app is still the answer.