Filed under: Audio, iTunes, Reviews, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch
Pocket Tunes plays sweet music
What! Another internet radio player for the iPhone? Yes, Pocket Tunes [App store link] does play internet radio in a pretty crowded field of similar iPhone/touch apps, but this little player has some unique attributes.
Pocket Tunes, which is also available for Windows Mobile and Palm phones, has excellent audio quality, and a nice, but not overwhelmingly large, selection of stations. You can add your own stations of course, and Pocket Tunes plays more audio formats than most of the other players out there, including aacPlus v1, aacPlus v2, Shoutcast, RTSP, and the usual suspects like MP3, AAC and WMA.
There are a few things that set Pocket Tunes apart from the competition. The GUI is pretty, not just a jumble of text, and the app contains a web browser so you can surf while listening to streaming music, something you simply can't do with other radio streamers. The browser can't see your Safari bookmarks, and you can't make your own, but listening to music and surfing the web is certainly better than listening to music and not surfing. The browser does have a link for the Google search engine, so getting to a website is not too painful.
You can also connect to the iTunes Store to buy any music you've listened to, and Pocket Tunes remembers stations that you have heard and caches them without your having to save them.
The audio quality of this app is quite good, and I got reasonably fast load and buffering times even using the EDGE network. I even tried to listen to music while driving, but when I plug in my car iPod adapter cord to the iPhone, I just get my regular playlists. I could have used the headphone out on the phone into the mini plug input on the car, but I didn't have the proper cable. Note to self: always bring the proper cables.
Pocket Tunes is $9.99, and competes against some fine free apps like AOL Radio and Flycast, and some apps that aren't free like Tuner [App Store link] and Wunder Radio [App Store link] which are both loaded with features for $5.99. Still, Pocket Tunes works very well, and unlike all the other entrants (except Flycast), it will let you read this review while listening to your favorite stations.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
billtompkins said 6:31PM on 12-23-2008
FlyCast lets you listen and surf the web at the same time. FlyCast is free.
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Mel Martin said 6:36PM on 12-23-2008
Good catch... yes it does.
Mel
Britonius said 8:18PM on 12-23-2008
So I have to pay $4 more just to be able to surf the web while listening to the radio, a little steep just to add a button for the Web.
Why can't Apple offer the option to keep an app running in the background if we so choose (via a pop-up when exiting the app if the dev adds that feature) and perhaps limit it to one so we don't overwhelm our iPhone and the battery. That way we could listen to radio apps while surfing, reading emails, facebook, myspace, IM, Twitter, or RSS feeds especially TUAW or anything else on the iPhone for that matter. They obviously provide this feature with the iPhone iPod feature as I can listen to my playlist and surf the web or whatever else I want to do using it.
I bought WunderRadio because it was able to play my radio station, plus it has NOAA Weather Radio stations if you need to tune into the weather while on the road or out camping in a cell phone covered campsite. Flycast would not play the local radio station I like, but I did ask the station to look at getting added to Flycast.
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ViRGE said 9:01PM on 12-23-2008
Does anyone know if this program supports custom streams and authenticated/login streams? The one thing that keeps me stuck on Tuner in spite of its missing AAC support and awful AAC+ support is that it can handle the above, which means I can use it with Digitally Imported/Sky.fm premium streams.
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Kevin said 9:15PM on 12-23-2008
It does support subscription streams.
brian said 11:28PM on 12-23-2008
(Sorry if this appears twice, it looks like my first post vanished...?)
Just wanted to check on two things:
1) The iPhone still can't play DAAP streams, right? So no streaming from iTunes inside the house?
2) The iPhone still can't play RTSP video streams, right? So no streaming live video from a QuickTIme Streaming Server?
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Tom P said 9:46AM on 12-24-2008
Can anyone tell me if this product is able to stream Radio Nova? (www.novaplanet.fr) I would gladly spend the money if id did, but otherwise its useless to me.
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ViRGE said 10:43AM on 12-24-2008
Some rough CPU usage benchmarking for those interested:
MP3 appears to be using mediaserved (i.e. the integrated MP3 decoder hardware), ~10% (85-75% idle)
AAC is using an application internal codec, 15-25% (80-65% idle)
AAC+ is using an application internal codec, 20-35% (70-50% idle)
FStream:
MP3 is using an application internal codec, 20-30% (70-50% idle)
AAC is using an application internal codec, 20-30% (70-45% idle) seems to use more CPU on average, while in the same absolute range
AAC+ is using an application internal codec, 25-45% (64-30% idle). Settles down at around 40%
FStream gets nailed, and rightfully so, for its high CPU usage. It looks like Pocket Tunes gets it right here by using the MP3 decoder built in to the iPhone, which keeps CPU usage low like it does with Tuner and RadioBox.
The difference is that someone is finally smart enough to not use the iPhone's built in AAC decoder for AAC and AAC+ streams, as for some reason it can't handle AAC streams and AAC+ streams don't have their sideband information decoded. Instead it looks like they're using a pure software codec in the application, which while it results in higher CPU usage means it can play back AAC and AAC+ properly.
And compared to FStream it uses less CPU while doing so (particularly against FStream's CPU starved AAC+ codec). It's still going to put a decent load on the battery, but AAC+'s low bitrates means that you can power down the 3G modem and cruise along on EDGE. This is definitely the best internet radio app out there, in my experience. I suspect they might have a hard time moving it at $10 though, but we'll see.
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Richly Chheuy said 1:17PM on 12-24-2008
I've used Pocket Tunes on my old Treo 700p. Best media player on the Treo, IMHO (but I remember paying $34.95 for a Pro license. Compared to that, $9.99 is a bargain.) But with so many Internet streaming apps out there (I use WunderRadio and Pandora mainly), no real reason to get this (other than the nicer UI).
I agree that Apple should allow some multitasking for a limited number of apps (up to 3 maybe). The only problem is that how you set a limit without any granular control of what apps are open, once you have radio, then email open, and then open another app, do you have the OS close the earliest app opened? I suppose there should be a way to call out running processes from the home screen and choose with apps to close. Or Apple exempt audio apps a la the iPod app.
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