0xvasic/lobby-radio-player

Lobby Radio Player is a free Windows application for playing background music in a shop, restaurant, or other local venue, with automatic advertisement breaks mixed in. The developer built it after finding that every existing tool for this job was either locked behind a monthly subscription, built for full-scale radio stations with overwhelming controls, or too complicated for non-technical staff to run day to day. The idea is simple: you paste in a radio stream link, choose a local mp3 or wav file to use as your advertisement, set how often it should play in seconds, and press play. Instead of abruptly cutting the music to blast the ad, the player fades the stream out smoothly, plays the advertisement, then fades the music back in, similar to how a professional radio station handles transitions. Music and ads have separate volume controls, so background music can stay quiet while ads are set a bit louder to actually get noticed. The program uses multiple background threads so the interface never freezes while it buffers a stream or manages timers, something that can trip up simpler audio players. It also includes a connection watchdog that automatically tries to reconnect every five seconds if the venue's internet drops, rather than crashing. An active hours scheduler lets the venue set operating hours, so the player automatically goes idle when the business closes and starts again for the next shift, saving bandwidth and system resources overnight. To use it, the computer running the software needs to be physically connected to the venue's sound system through an aux cable, Bluetooth, USB, or HDMI, with that output set as the default device in Windows. No coding or compiling is required: prebuilt downloads are available as either a standard Windows installer or a portable version that runs from a folder or USB drive without installing anything. For developers who want to look at the code, it is written in VB.NET using Windows Forms on the .NET Framework, with the NAudio library handling audio playback. The project is released under the MIT license, though the developer notes that venue owners remain responsible for obtaining any required commercial music licensing in their own country.