After the demise of plugins, shoutcast integration is not possible anymore: GitHub - rols1/Shoutcast2017: shoutcast.com-Plugin for Plex Media Server, Forum: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/296423/rel-shoutcast2017 and the feature request Bring internet radio stations into Plex was closed 2018.
So what are the options to listen to internet radio stations (soma.fm, shoutcast, etc.) via Plexamp?
There’s no such option at the moment.
Worse than Plex ignoring these pleas for Internet Radio, they seem to be actively shutting down threads asking for such functionality. Although not this one yet. So here’s my take.
This would be VERY easy to do. They don’t need to partner with any other ‘provider’. That’s like saying that in order to play movies, they’d have to partner with some movie provider, but that is NOT what Plex is about. The customer provides the content, all Plex does is present that to be played. We (the customer) provide the media and Plex plays it. So for Internet Radio, we can provide the URL and Plex plays it. It really is that simple. In fact I would NOT want this to be controlled by some Internet Radio listing site as they will NOT have everything. What we need is the way to configure PMS with any Station URL we want and be able to view those and play them as desired. We could even treat it like other media and provide our own Icon to display for each station, just like Album Artwork. As I said, it’s not hard.
There are obviously many Internet Radio apps available on all the different platforms, but there are good reasons why it makes more sense for Plex to be doing this:-
First of all, Plex is, or should be, our ‘go to’ media player. We know (and presumably like) the interface, we are used to it and there should be no need to switch to a different app just for this particular type of media. If we do, that’s a failure of Plex.
Secondly, a personal requirement of mine is to access satellite broadcast radio. Here in the UK, all the major stations are broadcast via satellite and with some specific hardware it is relatively easy to use the SatIP protocol to access this. I believe PMS can use SatIP but I’ve not looked into that yet. So my need is for a Plex Radio library in which each item could be either an Internet URL, or a local SatIP URL (just URLs so Plex doesn’t care which it is) and Plex would handle the different actual formats, possibly transcoding if required. I have done this using Icecast, ffmpeg and Nginx, but doing it all with Plex would be a more elegant and far superior solution and it requires nothing that Plex can’t already do with both hands tied behind its back.
Finally and I think very importantly, every IR player on the LAN (i.e. around the house) creates its own stream. If there are 10 players all playing the same station, that’s 10 independent streams using up the bandwidth of whatever Internet connection you have and also of course of the Internet itself. However, using PMS to access the station with a single stream and then just a local stream to each Plex player (same as when playing anything) would help to minimise Internet and local traffic. All of which helps to keep the Internet running smoothly and fast for everyone.
There’s no question it makes huge sense for Plex to provide this. The only question is when?
So much this! I’ve only recently switched to Plex, and love it, so much so that I bought a Pass almost immediately. However, the lack of internet radio is something I find very puzzling - after all, it’s already done for live TV, and internet radio should definitely form part of the media centre experience.
For me, this is the single most important feature to add in order to complete the functionality of Plex.
As OP suggested, Plex could simply play back user-provided internet radio streaming URLs.
In its simplest (and probably most desirable) form, Plex could just provide a number of “presets” which could be populated with streaming URLs by the admin.
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