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Thumbs up Internet Radio Box 1 5 1-dNaPdA
Internet Radio Box 1 5 1-dNaPdA
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.
Code:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OF2M1QU3
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