4. Getting your embed player set up

You’ve uploaded tracks, created playlists, and scheduled your first event - but all of that effort means nothing if your listeners can’t actually hear your stream. That’s where one of our embed player comes in.

In this guide, we’ll cover the following:

1. A description of each of the players we provide, and
2. A walkthrough of how to configure a player, such that it best suits your station’s website.

By the end, you’ll have a fully functional player, ready for your listeners to press play and hear your station come alive.

So let’s dive into it!

The different types of players we provide

Here at Radio Cult, we provide more than 10 types of embeds.

But in this help article, we just going to focus on our 4 player embeds. These are:

1. The inline player,
2. The dock player,
3. The square player, and
4. The popout player.

Each of these players are the same in the core functionality they support i.e. allowing visitors to your website to listen to your stream. Where they differ is their look and feel. So let’s look into each of these players in a little more detail.

The inline player

The inline player is a compact, rectangular widget with a configurable background, a prominent play button, metadata artwork on the left, track details displayed clearly beside it, and room for your station’s socials in the top right hand corner.

The dock player

The dock player is a slim, horizontal bar that tucks itself at the bottom of any page you insert it into. It has a configurable background, a prominent play button, metadata artwork, and track info - all laid out in a compact, always-visible footer interface that lets visitors control your station without scrolling.

The square player

This square player is a compact square widget - think album cover size - with a configurable background, centered play button, visible metadata artwork, and track information displayed beneath. It’s designed to stand alone anywhere on your page and catch the eye without demanding attention.

The popout player

This embed appears as a compact, floating mini-player in its own browser window or tab, featuring a play/pause button, metadata artwork, and track info cleanly laid out. It lets listeners pop the stream out of your page and keep tuning in while browsing or doing other things.

Below the player, it also displays your station’s weekly schedule in a simple, scrollable list, so listeners can easily see what’s playing now and what’s coming up next throughout the week.

Alrighty, with all the descriptions out of the way, it’s time to show you how to configure a player for your station’s particular needs.

How to configure your player

In this section, we’re going to walk you through setting up the Inline player for your station.

If the Inline player isn’t for you, fear not as the below steps are still very useful for configuring the other player embeds. Just note that some of these steps might not apply for the other players.

1. In the left hand navigation, click Embeds under the Listener channels section.

2. Under Player display, choose what the player shows:

• Event: the title of the current show/event and the artwork for any linked artists.
• Metadata: the current stream’s metadata, for example the title, artist and artwork of the current song, or live metadata from your streaming client (e.g. BUTT or Audio Hijack).

3. Under Theme, choose a style: Dusk, Midnight, Light or Custom.

4. Under Primary color, click the colour swatch, then pick a colour or enter a hex code. Click away (or the close icon) when you’re done.

5. Optional: Enter a Google Fonts ID to override the embed's default font. Custom font URLs aren't supported - only Google Fonts IDs. You can find the ID in the font's URL on the Google Fonts website. For example, the font "Playwrite Ireland" has the ID Playwrite+IE.

6. Under Corners, choose Sharp or Rounded.

7. Turn on Autoplay on load if you want the player to start as soon as it loads. Otherwise leave it off and listeners press play themselves.

8. Optional: Click Remove RadioCult branding to hide the Powered by RadioCult text. (Available on the Premium and Business plans.)

9. In the Embed HTML section, click the copy icon (Copy embed code) to copy the iframe code to your clipboard.

That was a few steps to get through wasn’t it?

You’re not done though. You’ll still need to take the HTML you copied in step 9 and add it to your website.

Unfortunately however, that’s all we can show on our end. We would love to illustrate how to do this, but there’s too many ways to build a website these days. If we were cover to all possible ways, this help article would turn into a novel and there would be no guarantee that we would have actually covered every conceivable website technology.

If you do end up getting stuck though, definitely feel free to reach out to us! We do know the odd thing about coding.

That’s that - assuming you’ve successfully added your player embed to your website, then everything should be in place for your listeners to hear your station come alive!

This is the last help article in our Getting started series of guides. We haven’t covered everything that Radio Cult has to offer. But we’ve certainly covered a lot. And hopefully with this knowledge under your belt, you’ll find broadcasting with us a breeze.

So get out there and start sharing your station’s magic with the world! We know we’ll be listening.