To receive StreamForge streams a custom audio player is used. It is based on Java applet technology and can easily be embedded in any website. It is guaranteed to run within Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera and will also work with most other Java enabled browsers. The player is tested on all common operating systems and works well on all current Windows releases including XP and Vista, MacOS, and Linux distributions.

The StreamForge player is designed for maximal usability. It hides the full complexity of the underlying system from the audience. Listeners are provided with an intuitive interface providing controls to start and stop playback and a dial to set the audio volume.

There is no external software installation required before listeners can access a StreamForge enabled radio station. The player applet is automatically downloaded with the website of the radio station and then locally cached. The only additional requirement to run the StreamForge player is the presence of a Java Runtime (Java 1.4 or newer) on the computer of the listener. Java is preinstalled on almost all modern computer systems. If it should be missing on the machine of a user, the Java installation page is automatically loaded.

At startup, radio playback begins within 2-5 seconds as no initial buffering is required. Due to the underlying peer-assisted streaming network listeners also enjoy very robust connections to the stream. There are always multiple sources for the radio signal in the network and therefore individual connection problems are automatically handled by the player without any user interaction or audible interruptions. With StreamForge technology choppy, interruption-prone playback is a problem of the past.

The StreamForge player can easily be incorporated in any website and offers a fully customizable frontend. The default player is a skinnable Java applet which is integrated in a website by copying a short code snippet. Alternatively, a JavaScript-based API to the player is available allowing more complex designs. The player applet can be hidden to give the webdesigner total freedom over the design and position the control elements for playback, volume control, and additional information such as RDS data or album covers.

Current asymmetric internet connections such as ADSL provide only a limited upload capacity which is far inferior to the available download speed. Our player is aware of this limitation and is designed to behave nicely in the presence of other applications sharing the same internet connection. Idle upload bandwidth is used to rebroadcast the currently received radio program. However, as soon as another application accesses the internet, our player releases parts of its resources to prevent a congestion of the connection. As a consequence, neither the user nor the application notice any slow-downs. This protection mechanism also works across multiple computers in a local network even if the player is only running on one of these machines.