This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: 12 Internet Radio Apps for iPhone + iPod touch. Additional details may be found in the original article.
Nullriver’s Tuner Internet Radio ($6) is StreamItAllRadio done somewhat better. Loaded with genre-sorted stations that are all labeled with bitrates and descriptions, Tuner presents stations with a simple line-based on-screen visualizer, volume controls, and a pause button, letting you bookmark favorite stations and providing simple track information where available.
In the Comedy genre alone, you get 3-4 times the stations of the AOL Radio application, and there are similarly Sports and Talk genres as well, some taken from AM and FM radio stations, as well as international stations taken from countries all over the world.
A Top 500 list lets you know what’s popular, and though a search feature yields spotty results—depending mostly on the popularity of your search term in the limited channel descriptive information—an “Open” button enables you to add stations you’ve found on the web. Nullriver makes adding these stations a lot easier than StreamItAll, typing the HTTP:// part of the URL for you, and supporting formats such as AAC+, MP3, PLS and M3U.
In addition to properly playing stations that were built in, we succeeded in getting Tuner to play a test station we pointed it towards, and could easily save additional stations as bookmarks. The only major issues with this program are its $6 price, which is steep enough for a program like this one to affect our rating, and its interface, which is iPhone-like and clean, but boring. More visualization options and even easier additional station finding tools might justify the asking price; otherwise, a cut in price would make this more worthy of mainstream attention.
