Behind the Airwaves
erlc.fm is a personal side project built for the Emergency Response: Liberty County community on Roblox.
The Origin Story
If you have been playing Roblox for a while, you probably remember the days of boomboxes and custom audio IDs. You could paste a code, jump in a patrol car, and blast your favorite tunes while driving around. It was a massive part of the immersion, especially for roleplay games like Emergency Response: Liberty County.
Then came the audio updates. Overnight, millions of user-uploaded sound files went silent due to copyright changes. Suddenly, police sirens, radio stations, and custom car audio systems vanished. Driving around on patrol felt incredibly empty. I found myself sitting in silence on long shifts, and I figured I wasn't the only one feeling that way. That is what sparked the idea for erlc.fm. I wanted to see if I could create a radio station that lived outside of Roblox but was tailored specifically for players inside the game.
The Battle for Sync
When I first started sketching out the idea, the biggest challenge was synchronization. If you open a standard stream, or just play a playlist, everyone is at a different place. You might be listening to the chorus of a track while your patrol partner is still on the intro. It completely ruins the feeling of a shared radio station.
To solve this, I built a custom sync engine. The server keeps track of exactly which track is playing and down to the millisecond where the playhead is. When you load up the website or use the bot in a voice channel, it calculates the network delay and skips you forward to the exact millisecond of the current song. This means when a beat drops, everyone listening hears it at the exact same moment—just like a real FM radio station.
Why Keep It Simple?
A lot of web projects eventually try to sell you premium memberships, show annoying banner ads, or force you to create accounts. I really didn't want erlc.fm to become that. Hosting a website and running bot servers costs money, but to me, this is a hobby. I want it to be a clean, simple, and unobtrusive tool.
There are no accounts, no subscriptions, and no paywalls. You click play, and you are listening. I wanted to build something that I would actually want to use myself, and keeping it simple and free is a core part of that.
The Journey & The Creator
Hey, I'm Vanjko! I am the developer behind erlc.fm. I'm a coder who loves building weird web projects, and I've spent plenty of hours playing ER:LC.
What started as a quick prototype in a weekend has grown into a full web station. Building the web player was only half the challenge; I also set up a custom Discord bot integration so players and server owners can easily check system stats, view status information, and link directly to the radio player from their own servers. It's been a massive learning experience, and seeing other players use the station during their patrol runs makes all the late-night debugging sessions totally worth it.
How it's built
If you're curious about the code, the project is built using a few standard web development tools:
Next.js · Tailwind CSS · TypeScript · Node.js · Discord.js
Get Involved
Since this is a community project, input from other players is what keeps it going. If you have song recommendations you want added to the rotation, want to report a bug, or just want to chat with other players, come hang out in the Discord server. I'm always open to feedback.
Join the erlc.fm Discord↗