A free Windows app carries forward a beloved community project — and takes it somewhere it could never go before.
For more than a decade, blind and low-vision listeners who wanted ACB Media on their desktop reached for the ACB Radio Tuner — a small, devoted tool built by and for the American Council of the Blind's radio community. It did one thing, and it did that one thing with care. It never chased the wider internet. It never grew a favorites tree, a recorder, or a second life beyond its original ten streams. It didn't have to. It was enough, for a long time, to just play ACB Media reliably and get out of the way.
Today, Community Access is releasing Quill Radio 1.0 — free, and built from the ground up as the spiritual successor to that project. It plays every ACB Media stream out of the box, with zero setup. And then it keeps going: tens of thousands of stations from every country on the map, a real favorites system with folders as deep as you want them, recording that picks itself back up if your internet stumbles, a wake-up timer, hardware media key support, and a system tray presence that keeps the music playing while you work. It is, quite simply, everything the original tuner was — plus everything a modern radio app was always missing.
"When I first heard about the ACB Radio Tuner years ago, it felt like someone had finally built something for us instead of merely accessible to us," said the President of Blind Information Technology Solutions (BITS), an ACB affiliate. "Quill Radio takes that same spirit and asks a bigger question: what if the whole world's radio worked that way? What if recording a show, organizing your favorite stations, and waking up to your favorite program were all just as effortless as pressing Enter on a station name? This isn't a replacement for what we loved. It's what we always hoped it would grow into."
Quill Radio opens with your favorite stations already front and center — arrow down, press Enter, and you're listening. No dialogs to dismiss, no mouse required, nothing standing between you and the sound. The built-in ACB Media collection carries all ten of ACB's own streams — Mainstream, The Trove, Cafe, Community, Live, Special, and the rest — playable the moment you install, exactly as the original tuner promised.
But where the ACB Radio Tuner stopped, Quill Radio was just getting started. Browse Stations opens a huge, friendly directory of live stations from around the world: tens of thousands of them, searchable by name, genre, language, or tag, with a quick listen before you commit to a favorite. Found a stream on a website that isn't in any directory? Find Streams from a Website scans the page and offers up whatever it finds. Paste a web address directly if you already know exactly what you want. However a station reaches you, it becomes a favorite with one keystroke.
The original tuner had a flat list. Quill Radio has folders — as many, and as deep, as you want. Build "News," then "News > Morning" and "News > Evening" inside it, creating any of them right where you need them, before a single station lives there. Rename any station to what you call it — your own name follows it everywhere, from the main window to the tray to the Recently Played list. Delete a folder and its stations don't vanish with it; they step safely back to the top level. Nothing you build is ever one keystroke from destroyed.
Every favorite remembers its own volume. Stations are mastered wildly differently — one whispers, the next one shouts — and Quill Radio only makes you fix that once per station, forever.
Recording in Quill Radio isn't a fragile afterthought. Start a capture and, if your connection drops mid-show, Quill Radio first tries to quietly ride out the gap; if the drop is real, it waits, reconnects, and picks up right where it left off in a new, clearly numbered file — with how hard it tries and how long it waits entirely yours to set. Record what's already playing, or record a second station while you listen to something else entirely. Schedule a show once, daily, or weekly, picking straight from your favorites list instead of retyping a web address from memory. And the Recordings window shows the whole story at a glance: recording now with its size growing live, recorded and ready, or scheduled and waiting — with Play, Stop, Open in Folder, and Remove all one keystroke away.
Check Resume Last Station on Launch once, and Quill Radio becomes exactly what a radio should be: something you turn on. Play Last Station (Ctrl+L) picks up wherever you left off without any navigation at all. The Wake-Up Timer is the sleep timer's twin — pick a favorite, pick a time, once or every day, and the station starts itself. Hardware media keys control playback anywhere on your PC, even when the app is tucked away in the tray, with its own icon and a live now-playing tooltip.
And no matter where a stream comes from — a favorite, ACB Media, Recently Played, or a fresh search — starting it always silences whatever else was playing, radio or podcast, everywhere in the app. You never hear two things fighting for your attention.
Every single thing Quill Radio does, it says out loud, working smoothly with JAWS, NVDA, and Windows Narrator without ever stealing focus. The Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) puts every Quill Radio command behind one searchable list. What's Playing (Ctrl+T) speaks the current track or show title the moment you ask.
Quill Radio shares everything with QUILL and QUILL Cast: favorites, history, recordings, schedules, and settings all travel together, everywhere. Favorite a station here, and it's already a favorite in QUILL. Set a wake-up timer in QUILL, and it fires here. Nothing is ever set up twice.
Quill Radio comes as a simple installer or a truly portable version you can carry on a USB stick, favorites and all. Both come with everything already built in for recording — nothing to download separately, ever. Help > Get FFmpeg stands ready as a safety net on the rare chance anything ever goes missing. In-app Check for Updates knows exactly which version you're running and fetches the right one automatically, with friendly spoken progress the whole way.
Quill Radio is, and always will be, free. It is also young, and it grows from the people who use it. Help > Report a Bug sends us a note directly from inside the app — no account or sign-up required — stamped with Quill Radio's own version number so we always know exactly what you were running. Every report shapes what ships next; that has been true since the first line of QUILL was written, and it's just as true here.
Quill Radio is offered with real gratitude to the American Council of the Blind and to everyone who built and maintained the original ACB Radio Tuner over the years. That project proved something important: that a radio app designed specifically for blind listeners, by people who understood exactly what that meant, could be simple, dependable, and genuinely loved. Quill Radio doesn't replace that legacy. It's an attempt to honor it — by taking the same care and pointing it at the whole dial.
About Quill Radio
Quill Radio is a free, screen-reader-first internet radio application for Windows, built by Community Access and sharing its foundation with the QUILL writing environment. It is not yet digitally signed by Microsoft, so Windows SmartScreen may show a caution on first run — choose "More info," then "Run anyway," and you're on your way.
Learn more and download: http://www.quillforall.org/radio.html Send feedback: Help > Report a Bug, right inside the app
About Community Access
Community Access builds free, screen-reader-first software including QUILL, Quill Radio, and QUILL Cast — created by and for the community that depends on it. Learn more at http://www.quillforall.org.
Media contact: http://www.quillforall.org