Small stations relay things. Network news at the top of the hour, a syndicated weekend show, a sister station overnight. Most automation treats that as a special case requiring a separate mode.
It does not need to be. A stream URL is just another playlist row.
Adding one
File → Add Stream URL… accepts any http, https or mms address, with an optional display name so the row reads "Network News" rather than a long URL.
The result is inserted as a normal track with a duration of zero, and the playlist shows LIVE in place of a running time. That is honest: a stream has no known length, and pretending otherwise would corrupt every start-time calculation below it.
It behaves like a track
Streams route through Media Foundation, the same path as WMA files, and land in the same deck structure as everything else. That means crossfades work, loudness normalization applies per deck, and the VU meters read the stream exactly as they read a file.
Because normalization is applied per deck rather than globally, a quiet network feed and a loud music bed can follow each other without either being wrong. Each carries its own correction through the transition.
Where it gets careful
Streams connect slowly, and sometimes not at all. That is why the engine opens the next track on a background thread — a stream taking three seconds to negotiate will not freeze the interface or block the Stop button.
Streams are also deliberately excluded from the imaging classification used for transition policy. A relay is not a jingle; it should not be hard-cut like one.
Combining with the clock wheel
The pairing worth knowing: a clock wheel slot can fire a stream URL at a fixed minute of the hour. That single combination is how a small station takes network news at exactly the top of the hour without anyone in the building.
The music runs from a rotation clock, the wheel fires the news relay at :00, and the operator's job becomes checking that it worked rather than making it happen.