VPR and VPR Classical on your Internet/Wi-Fi Radio

A number of listeners have emailed recently with questions about Internet Radios (aka Wi-Fi Radio). If you've never heard of it, internet radios are just "radios" that very conveniently play online streams. It's just like streaming a radio station on iTunes or Windows Media Player except you're using a small radio, not a computer.

The most common question from listeners has to do with errors in the station frequencies or listings. One listener looked up WNCH 88.1FM expecting to hear VPR Classical, but heard VPR instead. Our President & General Manager Mark Vogelzang was using an Internet Radio and he could only find a low-bandwidth option for VPR Classical and not the high-bandwidth stream. These sorts of errors are common right now (since this is a new technology). The reason is that these radios look up database directories to find the streams and these listings are prone to errors. The good news is that many wi-fi radio manufacturers provide easy-to-use websites that let you correct errors and add new listings to the directory.

Which leads to the next question: how can I add VPR and VPR Classical if I don't find it in my Wi-Fi Radio? This varies among the different radios, but every brand has some way of adding your own favorites if you don't find it in their lists. To do that, you'll need these web URLs for the streams:

VPR high-bandwidth: http://vprhigh.streamguys.net:80
VPR low-bandwidth: http://vpr.streamguys.net:80
VPR Classical high-bandwidth: http://vprclassicalhigh.streamguys.net:80
VPR Classical low-bandwidth: http://vprclassical.streamguys.net:80
BBC: http://vprbbc.streamguys.net:80

If you have questions or feedback about Wi-Fi Radio, send them along.

Jonathan Butler
Online Manager
Vermont Public Radio