TuneIn Radio Pro, an app from TuneIn, Inc., is available for 99 US cents at Google Play.It wasn’t too long ago that you’d have to pore over shortwave radio schedule listings,cross referencing time of day, with frequency in kilohertz, in order to listen to long range,overseas broadcasts — picking out the words from the spooky radio harmonics.
Then along came the Internet, which allowed for a continuous stream of mellifluousprogramming to be place-shifted anywhere. Podcasts then allowed for a form of time-shifting, and ultimately the smartphone and mobile network gave us portability.
The Old Days
My first experience with the streaming of radio onto a smartphone involved searchingout mms protocol audio streams designed for desktop Web and manually entering endlesscharacters into primitive Windows Mobile audio player applications on the Palm Treoplatform.
If my mobile carrier — or the broadcaster — had ever bothered to confer and check theirserver logs back then and had seen what I was doing, they may well have thought thisguy was mad. But I did get to listen to hometown news wherever I was.
TuneIn Radio
TuneIn Radio’s app steps right in and capitalizes on these technologies and tools. I’vebeen taking a look at the Pro version.
TuneIn Radio brings the radio stations that we’re used to seeing in now-classic Internetradios, and indexes them in a mobile app. It claims to have 70,000 radio stations.
Here’s where it differs slightly in the classic Internet radio sense: It also indexes 2 millionon-demand audio podcasts and segments, and in the Pro version, includes recordingfunctionality.
Comprehensive Indexing
The indexing organization is excellent, and categories include location, language, talk,local, music and so on. Subcategories are as expected: classic rock, adult contemporary,sports talk, college baseball and so on.
Indexing is comprehensive, with practical scanner streams like fire department dispatchfrequencies indexed by locality.
Exploring during testing was made easy with a simple, effective “Explore News” sectionthat allowed me to browse subjects like “Investigative” and “TV News.”
The equal treatment given to live, on-demand, scanner, TV News and so on is a splendidconcept that really shows off a post-radio “anything audio” approach.
Curated Content
A “TuneIn Topics” category carries curated, on-demand news report segments.Choosing, say “Occupy Wall Street” delivers a set of links to NPR pieces and others.
It was hard, however, to figure out who the broadcasters of the audio chunks werewithout listening to the sign-off at the end of the segments, because there wasn’t a clearbroadcaster byline — just a sometimes-vague logo.
Search Sometimes Stumped
Search worked well for news stories — less so for music.
A search for Bob Dylan, the musician, delivered a bunch of radio stations playing hisgenre, not as is promised in Google Play, a set of radio stations playing the actualtroubadour live.
A search for Bob Diamond, the exiting scandal-plagued banker, delivered acomprehensive set of podcasts in which he is mentioned, including multiple snippetsrelating to his final settlement package — the story of that day.
Lame Recording Functionality
TuneIn Pro’s recording functionality is half-baked. Although there is flawlessrecord capability, there’s no timer. So, big deal, you can record what’s playing now bypressing a record button.
But you can’t keep the device alive and configure a set of recordings every day at threein the morning, for example.
The recording function is the differentiator between the base app and the paid app.
Car Mode
Presets along with Car Mode work well. I found it easier to set up an account atTuneIn’s desktop website and choose my presets there though.
Car Mode provides larger-than-normal icons and buttons, and looked slick with nopixelation on my test device — a tablet that I have mounted in my vehicle — although Icouldn’t get Voice Search to work, nothing unusual there.
Customer Service
TuneIn’s CS is outstanding. I had interacted with it in a previous encounter whenI had been having a problem with the app failing to stream over Sprint on one of mydevices.
After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, TuneIn got me an unreleased beta version of theapp that fixed the issue. I did not tell the company I was a journalist during the dialog.
In Conclusion
TuneIn Radio Pro is a must-have app that defines the smartphone.
I’d like to give it five stars out of five, butcan’t because of the lack of timer recording functionality.
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