App of the Week — TuneIn Radio Pro

This week I take a look at TuneIn Radio Pro, a streaming radio app that blows open the world of Internet radio and places it at your fingertips in a well-designed and easy to use package.

To be honest, when it comes to the world of internet radio, I am a complete novice. I just didn’t see it having a place in our digital, instant satisfaction world. If I wanted to hear a song, I’d find it on Grooveshark, buy it off iTunes or get it from someone I know. That way I could listen to it when I wanted to, not when some annoying DJ who thinks he has the answers to the world’s problems chose to let me listen to it, while talking over both the intro and the outro. And to be honest, the online radio stations that I’ve been exposed to just didn’t play music that I want to hear, so I stick to my iTunes library.

This all stopped when I started work at my new job. We’re a small team who share a space, so I can’t just put on the headphones and continue with my work; that would be rude and inappropriate. So we started listening to one of the bigger radio stations available here, this drove me mad and I proposed that we look into another option. We then decided to use our boardroom PC as a radio and worked our way through a number of online radio stations before settling on Absolute Radio’s Classic Rock broadcast, which comes out of the UK. It’s a great station and we listen to it all the time now.

This station changed my thinking on Internet radio and I thought, as all of us do these days, there must be an app for that. Of all the apps I tested, TuneIn Radio Pro was the best, let’s jump into why.

First of all, TuneIn gives you access to the biggest selection on the market: over 60 000 radio stations and another two-million in-demand programs! Simply open up the app and it immediately loads your local radio stations, based on your location at that point in time, a few of the more popular stations listened to by the apps user base, and a section for your recent and favorite stations. You can search for other stations by filtering through genre; sub-genre, country, broadcast type and a whole lot more. My favorite find still has to be the Rockabilly Radio broadcast, where the DJ was completely trashed and playing the same song over and over again while moaning that no one had the decency to refresh his drink.

I tested the app on an uncapped 1MBPS connection and there were absolutely no loading or buffering problems at all. Just select the station, give it 3 seconds to load and right away, it starts playing, complete with artist and track names, radio program schedules and album artwork if available.

What I found quite interesting on the pro version is that it allows you to record audio streams to the hard drive on your device, just tap the big red button and let it record, its that simple. Some of the stations also give you the ability to rewind a few seconds back in case you missed the start of a song that you want to record. You can also setup timers and alerts on the app so that you don’t miss out on your favorite show, or the news broadcast and even have the app wake you up in the morning with your favourite Norweigan metal station. Oh the wonders of the internet!

If you’re a music lover who is sick of what is available on your FM dial locally, or just want to broaden your musical tastes, TuneIn Radio is for you.

60 000 radio stations for 99 cents — you know what to do.

Name: TuneIn Radio Pro

Seller: TuneIn

Category: Music

Size: 13.1MB

Price: US$0.99 (Universal)

Available for iPhone and iPad

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