Good morning

If you do not like vague ideas about opaque layers of technology which are of no big impact on anything, anyway.., then maybe do not read on.

As some may know, I listen to a few radio stations via an « Internet Radio ». For those who do not remember, this device looks like a radio.

But it receives streams via Wifi or – in ancient times – via cable. Most of the time, the streams are chosen from a really big bunch of pre-configured radio stations. While I can add stream-URLs, it has turned out, that those that I wanted to add had already been included by the manufacturer, though sometimes been filed under the wrong category.

The event:

When I listen to a radio station which is situated in California, upon turning on the radio or just after choosing the stream, first of all, I hear that a local supermarket has received a new delivery of fresh carrots from Spain. (Yeah. It is a mystery – “fresh” and “from Spain”)

Though would the supermarket be in San Diego, I would appreciate the information. But I live in Normandy (France) and they talk of a place about 8km from here that I know, although I would not buy my carrots there.

When I listen to a radio-station (called “Web-Radio” sometimes) in my Web-Browser, I know the URL that I have requested and sometimes can anticipate this kind of advert. It appears (to me) that those radio stations delegate their hosting to some platform which might or might not choose to send out adverts sometimes or – like in my case – at the moment of a new connection.

But...
The Question

Could you imagine a way for me to know *who* is responsible for the adverts in my Interet Radio ?

The question is *not* how to get rid of them. Not yet, at least.

Have a nice week-end.

Michael

maybe closing everything network, except your internet radio, and then running tcpdump on the interface, listen to radio, just long enough to hear the add and let the station start, and then analyze the dump, and see which ips are from where... that might turn something up if the add was a separate stream from a separate ip...

Thank you for the suggestion. I do not own a server to run tcpdump on, if everything is closed down. But maybe I am lacking imagination. I had asked my access provider, if I can see a list of connections to my ADSL modem including IPs and maybe Mac-addresses, but they told me this were not possible.

As I said.., I am clueless.

Update: Sorry.

I found an old discussion, where I had been told to use a hub or other device in between my ADSL-modem and the Internet-radio. This clarifies (again) how packages could be sniffed and probably renders my topic obsolete.

Short memory.

Cheerio.

Can you find the url or IP/Port that the stream is coming from? Look at the source to see what the site is doing. Or, dump all requests to terminal/file and look at them.

Finding one at random...
https://www.radio.net/s/rfimonde

The stream is:
https://rfimonde64k.ice.infomaniak.ch/rfimonde-64.mp3
And that is what I would play.

It depends on if you are using the sites api, and running their scripts, where they cut away to a commercial sometimes, and then return, or if you scrape out the main stream url, and play that.

Utube does that. If you watch videos in a web browser, you get ads.
If you use yt-dlp on the stream, you do not.

Thank you for the idea, but there is no terminal to look at. Imagine a radio : a device which has a few buttons which are *not programmable* and a loudspeaker. When the device is receiving a signal via WiFi from an ADSL-modem, the modem itself does not even seem to detect the device. The only thing I ever see connected to the ADSl-modem is my computer.

If I want to sniff packages, I first need to interfere with the connection between my radio and the ADSL-modem. Unfortunately, the radio does not offer any other way to connect, than via WiFi. Otherwise I would have played with an old DLink router, although I cannot even remember if it lets me see the traffic on all its interfaces...

Now I thought: I can try to listen to the same radio station in my Web-Browser and see what happens.
“Due to copyright law, Live365's Licensed Player is only available for listening in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. You may find this station elsewhere by searching the web or contacting the station owner directly to learn about international accessibility.
Detected country: FR”

I find the same station on other streaming platforms, but there, I never get localized adverts... The contrary would have been even more surprising.

Edit and Addition :
The radio does not offer any way to know the pre-configured stream-URLs. These devices are “rudimentary” in many ways, but that is what I wanted, when I bought one. I cannot know, via which platforms the streams are received, if I do not provide the URLs myself.