YARSP

Overview

There are plenty of internet radio players. I wanted one where every single thing could be reached from the keyboard and announced properly: where the station list reads correctly as you arrow through it, where nothing needs a mouse, and where the app tells you what it is doing without you having to go looking. YARSP is that player.

It is completely free. There is nothing to install: unzip the folder anywhere you like and run YARSP.exe. Everything YARSP saves, including favorites, settings, and custom stations, lives in a data folder next to the program, so moving the folder moves everything with it, and deleting it leaves nothing behind on your machine.

Finding stations

• Search by name, genre, country, or language across every directory at once, landing on the first result with no extra tabbing
• Browse a tree of directories: Radio Browser by genre or country, TuneIn by location from continent down to city, iHeartRadio by genre, and a Networks section collecting the BBC, NPR, CBC, ABC Australia, Radio France, Deutschlandfunk, SomaFM, and Stream Madness
• Add your own station by pasting a stream address, kept in its own section of the browse tree
• Browse remembers where you were, so playing a station and reopening the tree puts you back on it rather than at the top with everything collapsed

Listening

• Favorites you can reorder with Alt and the arrow keys, plus a recently played list. Alt+1 through Alt+0 play the first ten without opening anything.
• A three-band equalizer with presets, on Ctrl+E. The sliders announce their gain as you move them, and Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E switches it on and off from anywhere.
• Global hotkeys that work anywhere in Windows, even with YARSP hidden: play, stop, volume, next and previous favorite, and announce what is playing. All of them rebindable.
• Song titles shown in the window title and announced as tracks change, with the announcements switchable off
• Choose which sound card YARSP plays through. Unplug it and YARSP falls back to the default, then switches back when it returns.
• A tray icon with playback controls and your favorites, and a hotkey to hide the window while the radio keeps playing

Requirements

64-bit Windows 10 or 11.