Saturday, October 24, 2009

The WunderRadio App on the iPhone

So, I have an iPhone and the WunderRadio App is fantastic. It has links to so many different types of radio stations around the world and the organization is really great. It costs $6, a bit expensive for an app, but it's well worth it. It's based at least partially on RadioTime, which I've had for at least two years now and also love. I purchased that early which is good, as it's gone up in price. (Still, only $29 right now, and well worth it for it's recording capabilities and it's so easy to use.) RadioTime is sort of like Tivo for radio on the computer, but it's free if you don't want to record. Just the programming directory alone is incredible. All radio stations are organized by programs and they do a really great job of keeping up with programs and stations and you can email them when programs change (if they haven't caught it already) and they're usually very responsive. Check it out at http://radiotime.com/
But the WunderRadio app for the iPhone is separate and it aggregates so much, it's great, even XM, which surprised me, as they have a separate app for that on the iPhone (which XM charges monthly for, (damn them!;), but this circumvents it, very cool) and it has local radio (from anywhere in the world, which can be useful), tens of 1000's of stations by genre also from around the world - they boast 36,000 on their site right now (I can finally get WRNR on my iPhone, my favorite station out of Annapolis, MD - www.wrnr.com - Apple apparently has a problem with Flash, so I couldn't get it before - but WunderRadio links to the backend html, somehow) all these police, train and fire scanners, Internet archives with audio and video, and archive.org special links for Grateful Dead, Smashing Pumpkins, Blues Traveler, full concerts etc., video archives of old commercials, educational, classic cartoons, historical videos, (I just watched the Bikini Lagoon atomic bomb test explosion, the 4th ever A bomb with test animals put on ships with weird patchworks of coatings on them, to see how each coating would do against the nuclear burn, and old commercials from the 50s, crazy stuff). The historical videos alone it links to are amazing. Most are in archive.org but some are from other internet archives I believe. What's really cool about it is it displays "shows" or programs that are on at any given time, and what shows up in some of the genres can change depending on the time of day, from alternative rock to news to sports, all around the country. I can see if the World Cafe from WXPN (another favorite - www.wxpn.org/) is playing at anytime on any NPR station instantly...or any program anywhere. Obviously, I've been playing with it for a few hours. Fun stuff! And addictive!

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