About This Plugin
Here’s an odd little truth about internet radio.
Nearly every station broadcasts the name of the song that’s playing. Almost none of them broadcast the cover art. So you get “Rita Ora — Your Song” and a blank square where the artwork should be. Millions of listeners, staring at an empty box.
MBR Live Radio Player v3.12.2 fixes that. When a stream sends a title but no image, the player goes and finds the album art itself. Free, no API key, cached so one lookup covers every listener you’ve got. Switch it on and covers just start appearing, station after station.
A few things I learned building it:
📻 Some stations put their homepage URL in the artwork field. The player now checks whether a “picture” is actually a picture before trusting it.
🖼️ Tap any artwork, and it opens full size in a responsive lightbox — keyboard accessible, reduced-motion friendly, the lot.
🐛 The best bug of the week was artwork refusing to change between stations. Turned out an image optimisation plugin was rewriting the images with srcset, so the browser cheerfully ignored everything the player did. Two days of head-scratching, four lines of fix.
Still free. Still open source and GPL. Still no “pro” tier lurking round the corner. Built in Cleethorpes, as ever.
Working Demo – https://littlewebshack.com/radio/
Screenshots
