Surely you’ve heard of Internet Radio? Everyone from bedroom broadcasters to big commercial stations pumping out music and voice 24 hours a day via the Internet? And all for free

Surely you’ve heard of Internet Radio? Everyone from bedroom broadcasters to big commercial stations pumping out music and voice 24 hours a day via the Internet? And all for free? Sounds idyllic, but the reality is that there is huge variety in terms of file formats and bitrates, plus there’s a high turnover of ‘stations’. What’s needed is a clever iPhone application, with a real time, maintained database, to gather everything into an interface that ‘just works’. And Internet Radio Box is it.

In fact, there are several iPhone-hosted Internet Radio clients, but this is arguably the best and most all-encompassing. It draws in its own ‘Radio Box’ network of MP3 and WMA (Windows Media Audio) streaming stations, adds a complete SHOUTcast (an older, proprietary streaming format that’s starting to die out) directory as well, and then tops this by adding an entire ‘icecast’ (an open source rival to SHOUTcast) directory too. The end result is a mass of semi-organised radio stations that you can access anywhere on the planet, numbering over a thousand in all. That’s a lot of listening.

Internet Radio Box’s interface is well thought out, with four basic tabs: ‘Radio stations’ is the directory section, of course; ‘Player’ is effectively the ‘Now playing’ panel and music started here will continue to play while you access the other tabs; ‘Settings’ gives information about bandwidth used and lets you set up bitrate limits over 3G/EDGE; and, lastly, ‘Browser’ is a custom instance of Safari and means that you can look up information about a radio station while it’s playing. You’ll remember that the iPhone OS doesn’t allow third party apps to run in the background, so the moment you switch away from Radio Box the music stops – hence the workaround by including a browser within the application itself.

This limitation of only working in the foreground really hits hard with something like Internet radio – the whole point of it on other platforms is that it gives you a new source of tunes while you’re working away doing something else. On the iPhone in Internet Radio Box, you’re limited to using Safari in its own window, and that’s it. Apple, please take note and rethink your OS philosophy here.

This limitation isn’t the developer’s fault, though more could have been done to help matters – there’s no saving of your current station when the application is forced to exit, so you have to rely on manually adding stations as ‘Favourites’ and then using this list as your shortcut back to where you were before the interruption. Even so, I’ve still opted for a decent star rating in the review – at the end of the day, it’s the variety of material and the quality of the sound which is important here and Internet Radio Box comes through with flying colours. On many of the stereo stations, music is as clear here as when played in iTunes itself.

The main Radio Box directory is speedy to load and nicely organised, but the SHOUTcast and icecast directories are slow and are also let down by stations not being sorted alphabetically within each genre – when you’re looking for a specific station this is a right pain.

Look past the annoyances though, and you’ve still got a reliable core of enjoyable Internet Radio stations that will serve you well day in, day out, and all for free once you’ve handed over your dollar for Internet Radio Box itself.

This article was published by iphoneapplicationlist.com

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