The Internet is proving to be an interesting outlet for traditional, commercial radio. Many programs like iTunes, offer streams from various radio stations.
WunderRadio is from the Weather Underground folk, and it brings you literally thousands of radio stations and streams from around the world. Let’s take a closer look!
WunderRadio is simply one of the biggest and best radio hubs out there. With it, you can bring up radio stations from all corners of the world. I have been using it to listen the news station from my hometown of Detroit, MI every day on my way to work. I’ve used it to bring up stations in other countries when friends tell me to “check out” something on their local stations.
This program is simply amazing – not so much for the technical achievement, but for the scope of the thing and fact that they’ve managed to create one of the largest iradio station hubs ive ever seen and still make these thousands of stations available in a way that is accessible. You can zero in on what you want to find easily. You can search by genre, or you can search by location. No matter how you perform the search, you will easily find what you are looking for. The application description page indicates that there are more than 30,000 stations available. I don’t know if that’s true, but there are definitely thousands of stations in the lists – even the satellite radio stations of Sirius and XM are available if you have subscriptions to their services.
The program offers in-app playing of the stations or, if you wish, it will spool many streams out to the web link/QuickTime launch that will permit the radio station to play in the background while you do other things – effectively giving you some of the functionality you have in the iPod Application. To be certain, it isn’t as convenient as it would be if everything occurred within the application, but it is still very functional.
To support as many links as it can, WunderRadio also supports quite a few audio codecs (including windows for playing Bloomberg, etc.). It will even respect parental controls placed on Safari.
Yes, for an iPhone app it’s a little expensive at $6.99, but I have to admit it’s become one of the apps I use the most. For me, it was worth the price. If you are an avid fan of radio, you owe it to yourself to hop on over to the AppStore and check it out! Be warned, however, it does have a 17+ rating due to the fact that it accesses Safari and web content.
What I Liked: The sheer volume of available stations! Wow!
What Needs Improvement: I’d love it if there was a way to keep the background audio launching within the app. The process of handing it off is a little slow – and can take up to a minute before you hear the stream start again. It’s a minor annoyance though – not a show-stopper. The price is a little high, as well.