For those who had planned a London entertainment getaway before all hell broke loose, BBC 4 radio dramas can still shine a light on West End acting talents. California Dreaming of a ride up Laurel Canyon with local legends singing in your ears? Dial into SomaFM’s Left Coast 70s. MyTuner Radios Free Universal App is Launched Today for Apple TV.Wanna hang on a hot Brazilian beach with a nouveau Girl from Ipanema? The internet radio station Paul in Rio can take you there.Mentioned in this articleThe Great American Songbook station, based in the Netherlands, is a perfect example. Better still, most of these stations are free of commercials, thanks to government and listener funding, college backing, or private endowment by the creator. PaulInRio.com streams from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.Even the most esoteric of musical (and informational) tastes—from Bollywood to Schlager—are served by the dozens on internet radio: Digital audio services you call up on any web-connected speaker, computer, or smartphone. Jonathan Takiff / IDGInternet radio lets you hear musical styles from where they were born. More into the Paris café scene? An atmospheric soundtrack of cool-school and Django-ing gypsy jazz is just a tap (and snifter of cognac) away on the city’s sublime TSF Jazz and FIPS autour du Jazz outlets.TuneIn Radio comes pre-installed or is loadable on more than 200 connected devices, including smart speakers from the likes of Sonos and Bose, smart TVs, streaming media players (e.g., Roku and Amazon Fire TV), smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles (Xbox and PlayStation), and personal computers.With a global database of more than 100,000 stations in 197 countries and 22 languages, plus 5.7 million podcasts and on-demand show offerings, TuneIn comes closest to world radio completeness (and domination). You can use its service on the web or with an Android or iOS app, but an ad-free experience costs $9.99 per month.First among many, and first in my heart, is TuneIn Radio, the 800-pound gorilla of internet radio station aggregators. Michael Brown / IDGTuneIn Radio is the 800-pound gorilla of internet radio aggregators. How to tune in to internet radioIf you know a station’s call letters or name, it’s a snap to haul in a specific internet radio station on a computer or smart device—just type it in or speak to a smart speaker like an Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod.For deep-sea fishing in the great unknown, though, it pays to go through a radio station aggregator: An online database of curated links to radio stations searchable by location, genre, popularity, and—sometimes—stream quality. To these ears, the station’s content rivals that of pay-radio SiriusXM’s Siriusly Sinatra channel, but as with all internet radio streams, both live and on-demand, the price of admission to The Great American Songbook is free.Aiming to become a one-stop destination (and sell more advertising), iHeartRadio also serves up mass appeal playlists and personalized music stations (a la Pandora) has distribution deals with commercial radio chains in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and also links listeners to some non-aligned stations. To access those, you need to tap into the iHeartRadio app and portal, likewise accessible for free on internet radios, smartphones, tablets, computers, and similar connected devices. Markets owned by iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications).
![]() Best Radio App Free Universal AppThe VTuner platform powers several lines of smart speakers and A/V receivers, though in recent years it has lost significant market share to Airable, a rival based in Germany. I also appreciate that this app lets a user search through its inventory by the sonic quality of signal (more on that momentarily). Literally hundreds of world stations presenting in a particular category are accessible with a single tap on VTuner’s barebones, but functional website. About 30 staffers toil in the Philippines to keep its inventory of station formats, URLs, and streaming codecs up to date. Jonathan Takiff / iDGVTuner’s stripped-down but content rich app lets you dig for gold by genre, location, language, fastest speed, lowest speed and popularity.Veteran internet radio aggregator VTuner does have a database that rivals TuneIn. Automate login and verify login for websit using selenium java and firefox on macAnd I found some interesting, net-only stations on Internet-radio.com , although the entries on its “Featured” list suggest paid-for positioning. Jonathan Takiff / IDGThe station rankings on MediaU.net show that country music isn’t just an American phenomenon.I’ve also had good luck fishing in the waters of Radio.net. What’s #1 on their Country station roundup? Prague-based Country Radio, featuring Czech-language singing cowboys. Tap a location dot and up pops selected picks from the immediate area and nation. (But the site was characterized as “not secure” and needing third-party software intercession before I could load it on my iMac.) Open this thing up on a screen and you’re presented an animated map of the world. This highly engaging, super-fast search tool can be easily planted on a smartphone or tablet via an iOS or Android app. ![]() A recent, hour-long afternoon “sweep” of rustic folk classics like Sam Stone and Illegal Smile playing on Eclectic24 was all the announcement I needed to know that John Prine had just died, and that someone at the station was mourning and paying tribute. And when necessary, the shows can be turned on a dime. Como AudioComo Audio’s elegant Musica offers an excellent means of accessing the rich content available on internet radio.But the quirkiness of the selections, the themes laid out in the segues indicate the presence of a human being, not an algorithm, making the aesthetic calls and structuring the playlist. Even technically and financially strapped stations in third-world countries are serving up MP3 content encoded at 48-, 56-, and 64Kbps, or else working with the more efficient AAC codec at bit rates of 32- or 48Kbps, typically with a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. ThinkstockIf this is what you picture when you hear “internet radio,” it’s been much too long since you listened to an internet radio station.The story is different today, judging from VTuner’s posted transmission rates (information users can also call up on Como Audio radio displays). The lossy digital compression schemes deployed in mid-1990s streaming audio players like RealAudio and Nullsoft were crude and extreme, with low bit rates chopping off each song’s head, tail, and feet to squeeze it through the modest data pipe available to private internet users at the time.Even into the early 2000s, it was common to find “perceptual coded” MP3 streams running at rates as low as 16Kbps—buying into the psycho-acoustic theory that louder sounds obscure quieter ones, so why bother to shove all that “extra” data down the pipe? MP3 freaked the hell out of discerning musicians like Neil Young, who knew what was being lost in translation.
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