Tuner

Remember those days of sitting by your computer and playing around with Winamp or browsing through Shoutcast.com to listen to streaming music. Remember you'd have to be near by your pc to enjoy the music. Well not anymore, Nullriver, Inc. has released Tuner. Now the world of streaming Internet radio has come to the iPhone and you can take it where you go. I've tested this application over that last week and boy can I tell you, I love this little application. Works flawlessly over wifi and over 3G. On Edge, I would not recommend it at all; edge is too slow to handle the load a stream of music needs. Even with low bit rate broadcasts Edge cannot handle it. When using Tuner on a 3G network however the experience is much more enjoyable. On the 3G network, my favorite station is .977, the 80?s channel. The stream I choose is the 128-bit stream, and the 3G network handled the stream great.

The interface is very user friendly. You can have bookmarks for your favorite stations, search by genres and choose a stream from the top 500 shoutcast streams. There is also a search feature to find your favorite stations.

The "Now Playing" interface is simple and straight to the point. It has a buffer queue, to let you know how strong of a ?signal? is streaming in. It also has an oscilloscope that comes in a range of colors. To change the color just tap once and the color changes. One big thing is that this software also works in landscape mode and works flawlessly when switching modes. I would recommend this application if you are someone that listens to streaming radio. For $5.99, I thought it was a steal.

The only downside to this program is that it does not work in the background, that?s Apple?s doing, and it works for a short period when you put the phone to sleep. So that means you?d have to keep the application running with the screen burning power. If you are using this with 3G or wifi, the power requirements are huge. I would recommend that they allow it to run in the background or while the phone is sleeping to save some power.

Enjoy.