TuneIn Radio Review

Love your iPad but find it cumbersome having to seek out apps that contain the streaming live media you enjoy? Sure, Pandora does an effective job of providing users with quick access to streaming media, but there are moments when you may just miss your local radio stations, or wish you could quickly find live sports news you need without having to access the web or turn on a radio. That’s why there’s TuneIn Radio.

Powered by RadioTime, an online radio directory with 40,000+ stations, TuneIn Radio fulfills your live music, sports, and news media needs by providing you with prompt access to stations, either by entering the station’s name, the name of its shows, songs or artists its known for playing, or a custom URL. You’ll also be impressed by how simply you can find “local” stations based on your GPS or WiFi location data.

If you live in the United States, you’ll be able to search for stations by artist and find new stations that you may grow to love. If you own a DVR and rely on the ability to pause and rewind during live shows, you’ll love the fact that this app allows you to do the same with your radio shows. We were pleased with the comprehensive listing of stations by category: music, talk, and sports. Each category contains numerous sub-categories and, once selected, a listing of local stations, related shows, and stations. Once you find a station you enjoy, you can record your media and listen at a time of your greatest convenience. Of course, doing so frequently or for prolonged periods of time may take up a significant amount of memory. (For example, our 1 hour and 48 minute recording took up 55.7 MB of device memory.)

We’re quite pleased that the developer has added support for iOS 4 by enabling background streaming, so you can listen to your favorite stations while browsing the web, playing a game, or writing e-mails. Additionally, the audio controllers are accessible by the general control panel.

With its simplistic but easy to navigate interface (in both landscape and portrait views) and extremely reasonable price ($1.99), we believe you’ll find little to complain about when using this app. Sure, we acknowledge that it's not a perfect app--some stations are susceptible to interference or exhibit lower audio qualities than others--and due to the high volume of stations that exist, it's possible that its database does not contain every station, but it contains plenty. Overall, we found a multitude of options with high quality and were quickly able to discover new stations. The recording of stations is also a useful feature we anticipate taking advantage of quite frequently. And if all this isn’t enticing enough, you’ll appreciate the ability to use set an alarm that will wake you up playing a station of your choice or the ability to set a sleep timer.