Stations that play

Every published station is checked automatically: curated stations and anything played in the last 30 days daily, the long tail weekly, and any failing stream daily until it recovers. A station plays when its stream answers with audio.

An hour after the check, the catalog fixes itself. Hard failures (404, DNS, refused) retire a long-tail station after 3 days; soft ones (timeouts, 5xx) after 5 days and a second opinion from another vantage point. Retired stations stay on the daily check and come back once they play for 3 days. When Radio Browser lists a working replacement URL, the stream is swapped instead. Dead logos are removed and plain-http logos moved to https. Curated stations are never changed without a human review.

Now playing, logo and homepage are extras: they are reported next to the headline, never mixed into it. A check that doesn’t apply, or hasn’t run yet, is left out of its share.

The data lives on the health-data branch and the method is documented in docs/station-health.md. A station plays fine but shows as failing? Open an issue.