You need a browser and a microphone. No software to install, nothing to configure, and it works on the free plan.
Going On Air
- Open Studio in the sidebar, or press Go live now on your station’s overview. Nothing goes out from this page.
- Choose Mic + music or Music only, then press Check your mic, say something and watch the meter move.
- Your browser asks for microphone access. Say yes — this prompt is the whole security model, and if you dismiss it nothing can work.
- Add the tracks you want to play to your running order.
- Press Go live. GoCast checks your connection, your station, your mic and the audio, and you go on air the moment they pass; the studio opens. If a check fails it says why, and nothing went out.
You do not need to switch the station on first. Going live does that as part of the same action.
You Are About Fourteen Seconds Ahead of Your Listeners
There is a buffer between your microphone and somebody's speakers, and it is not small — roughly fourteen seconds. This is normal for internet radio and it is the price of a stream that does not stutter.
It has two practical consequences. Do not monitor your own station in another tab while broadcasting — you will hear yourself from fourteen seconds ago and it is impossible to talk over. And when you take a request from a chat, the person asking is reacting to something you said a quarter of a minute earlier.
What Ends Your Broadcast
- Closing the tab. This is the one to know. The broadcast lives in the tab, so closing it ends the show.
- Refreshing the page. A reload ends the broadcast the same way. Go live again and your queue picks up where it left off, on the same track.
- A wifi hiccup is survivable. A dropped connection reconnects by itself, and listeners stay connected through it.
- Following a link out of the dashboard. Anything that leaves the app takes the broadcast with it. Help links from inside the dashboard open in a new tab for exactly this reason — treat anything else the same way, and middle-click it.
On a Phone
It works, with one rule: keep the tab in the foreground. Mobile browsers aggressively throttle background tabs, and a throttled tab is a broadcast that stutters and dies. Do not switch apps mid-show. For anything longer than a few minutes, a laptop is the safer instrument.
Ending It
Stop the broadcast from the studio. If you have AutoDJ, the music picks up where it should be and your listeners stay connected through the handover — no one has to reopen the link. Without AutoDJ, the station goes off air shortly afterwards, because there is nothing left for it to play.
Either way there is a tail: the last ten seconds or so of what you said is still travelling to listeners after you press stop. Do not slam the laptop shut on your own sign-off.