RangerHQ Radio

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.

What you get

• 44 hand-curated stations from SomaFM 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).
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.
• OS media keys — F8/headphone buttons/lock-screen widget play and pause the radio (via MediaSession API).
• Mute toggle — the speaker icon is clickable; remembers prior volume.
• Dark theme — explicit dark option for the player surface (Settings → Theme).
• Per-user state — your chosen station, volume, theme, history, and favourites all live in user_meta, so each WordPress user has their own setup.

Third-party service

This plugin streams audio from SomaFM — 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 somafm.com/legal/. If you enjoy the music, please consider supporting SomaFM directly.

See the dedicated Privacy section below for everything that does and does not leave your site.

Privacy

RangerHQ Radio is privacy-respecting by design:

• No telemetry from the plugin. RangerHQ Radio does not phone home, report usage statistics, or contact the plugin author’s servers in any way.
• No data leaves your site. All per-user state — station choice, volume, theme, listening history, favourites — is stored in your own WordPress database (wp_usermeta) and never transmitted anywhere.
• Audio streams come from SomaFM directly. When you press Play, your browser opens an HTTP stream to https://somafm.com — the plugin does not proxy, log, or analyse this connection. SomaFM’s own privacy practices apply to the stream; see SomaFM legal.
• Current-track display polls SomaFM’s public songs endpoint (https://somafm.com/songs/{station}.json) every 30 seconds while audio is playing. The plugin sends no identifying information with this request. Polling stops the moment you pause.
• 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.
• No third-party JavaScript is loaded from outside your own server. All scripts ship inside the plugin.
• Updates come from WordPress.org through the normal WordPress core update process. The plugin does not contact any other update server.

If you do not want any third-party traffic at all, simply do not press Play.