A small, focused internet radio player for your WordPress admin — 44 hand-curated stations, history, favourites, and a pop-out window.

David Keane

RangerHQ Radio adds a tiny, focused internet radio player to your WordPress dashboard so you can have background music while you work in the admin — without leaving the page, opening Spotify, or installing a desktop client.
<h4>What you get</h4>
<ul>
<li>44 hand-curated stations from <a href="https://somafm.com" rel="nofollow ugc">SomaFM</a> across 10 genres — ambient, electronic, lounge, rock, metal, jazz, world, reggae, holiday and specials. From coding-focus ambient (Groove Salad, Drone Zone) to drive-time electronic (DEF CON Radio, Beat Blender) to mellow lounge (Lush, Secret Agent).</li>
<li>Now-playing indicator — small CSS dancing-bars equalizer that pulses while audio is playing. A Web Audio frequency visualizer kicks in automatically when the browser allows it (with a graceful fallback to the CSS bars).</li>
<li>Track history + favourites — every track that scrolls past is logged to your personal History page (capped at 500); a star toggle promotes the good ones to a separate Favourites tab that doesn’t age out. Each row has four search links (Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, Bandcamp) so you can find that track on whichever service you use.</li>
<li>Pop-out mini-player — a 380×560 standalone window that persists across the main tab’s navigation, so background music doesn’t cut when you move between Plugins, Posts, Users, etc.</li>
<li>OS media keys — F8/headphone buttons/lock-screen widget play and pause the radio (via MediaSession API).</li>
<li>Mute toggle — the speaker icon is clickable; remembers prior volume.</li>
<li>Dark theme — explicit dark option for the player surface (<code>Settings → Theme</code>).</li>
<li>Per-user state — your chosen station, volume, theme, history, and favourites all live in <code>user_meta</code>, so each WordPress user has their own setup.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Third-party service</h4>
This plugin streams audio from <a href="https://somafm.com" rel="nofollow ugc">SomaFM</a> — an independent, listener-supported, commercial-free internet radio network broadcasting from San Francisco since 2000. RangerHQ Radio is a small WordPress wrapper around their public streams; the service itself provides all the music. SomaFM’s terms of use are at <a href="https://somafm.com/legal/" rel="nofollow ugc">somafm.com/legal/</a>. If you enjoy the music, please consider <a href="https://somafm.com/support/" rel="nofollow ugc">supporting SomaFM directly</a>.
See the dedicated Privacy section below for everything that does and does not leave your site.
<h3>Privacy</h3>
RangerHQ Radio is privacy-respecting by design:
<ul>
<li>No telemetry from the plugin. RangerHQ Radio does not phone home, report usage statistics, or contact the plugin author’s servers in any way.</li>
<li>No data leaves your site. All per-user state — station choice, volume, theme, listening history, favourites — is stored in your own WordPress database (<code>wp_usermeta</code>) and never transmitted anywhere.</li>
<li>Audio streams come from SomaFM directly. When you press Play, your browser opens an HTTP stream to <code>https://somafm.com</code> — the plugin does not proxy, log, or analyse this connection. SomaFM’s own privacy practices apply to the stream; see <a href="https://somafm.com/legal/" rel="nofollow ugc">SomaFM legal</a>.</li>
<li>Current-track display polls SomaFM’s public songs endpoint (<code>https://somafm.com/songs/{station}.json</code>) every 30 seconds while audio is playing. The plugin sends no identifying information with this request. Polling stops the moment you pause.</li>
<li>Search-provider links (Spotify / YouTube / Apple Music / Bandcamp) are outbound only. Clicking one opens a new tab with a search URL on that service — the plugin sends no data and stores no information about which links you click.</li>
<li>No third-party JavaScript is loaded from outside your own server. All scripts ship inside the plugin.</li>
<li>Updates come from WordPress.org through the normal WordPress core update process. The plugin does not contact any other update server.</li>
</ul>
If you do not want any third-party traffic at all, simply do not press Play.

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