Coromandel’s CFM Stream URLs

Stream Coromandel’s CFM Your Way

Look, the official CFM website and app are great and all, but sometimes you just want to pipe the Best Music Variety directly into the app of your choice without any browser tabs, autoplay restrictions, or CPU overhead. Good news: Coromandel’s CFM streams openly, and your favourite media player almost certainly speaks the language.

Stream URLs

Coromandel’s CFM offers two flavours of stream in two different formats, so you’ve got options depending on your connection and your gear.

What players work?

Pretty much any media player worth its salt will handle these streams. Think VLC, mpv, foobar2000, and even Winamp. Just point them at a URL and let them get on with it. Mobile apps that support network streams work great too. If your player can open a URL, you’re in business. And if you’re running a Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer as a dedicated music streamer, these URLs are exactly what you need. A Pi running mpv or VLC from the command line makes for a tidy little Coromandel’s CFM appliance that just sits there doing its job, quietly and reliably.

Icecast or HLS?

If in doubt, start with the Icecast normal stream (https://stream.cfm.co.nz/normal). It’s the most universally compatible and works in almost every media player ever made.

HLS is ideal if you’re using a player that handles adaptive streaming well, or if you find the Icecast connection dropping on your network. Dodgy connection? HLS is the one.

Normal or low quality?

The normal stream is the one to go for if you care about audio quality. While FM sounds fantastic, the 192Kb/s AAC stream is technically higher quality than the over-the-air broadcast. FM introduces noise, signal interference, and its own broadcast compression, whereas the online stream remains digital and is technically cleaner, but if you miss the FM interference, why not add some background white noise? The low stream holds up surprisingly well for the bitrate and is perfectly fine for background listening or when you’re on a metered connection, though if you’re really paying attention you may notice the highs sounding a little mushy. HE-AAC v2 is clever codec wizardry but it does have to make sacrifices somewhere, and treble detail is usually first to go. Technically, 48Kb/s is so lean it could run on a dialup connection, though if you’re reading this article on dialup, we have far more pressing questions about your situation than which stream URL to use.

How the stream is put together

The online stream isn’t just FM audio grabbed off-air and shoved onto “the wifi”. The streaming side of things runs on its own dedicated hardware, completely independent from the broadcast chain, which means it stays up and sounds good regardless of what the transmitter is doing. The audio processing is also handled separately, so what you hear online is its own thing crafted with tender love and care. We’d tell you exactly what’s in the rack doing all this, but where’s the fun in that.