App Profile: KEXP

Oneiricflux

Rating: 4/5

I’m newer to the KEXP app/community and truly love the variety of shows available. I listen pretty much daily, and I’ve found I often need to go to the KEXP website to successfully play certain archived shows that don’t play at all on the app. I’ve tried restarting my phone and the app but often am unable to hear any music when playing some archived shows (from my phone directly or through a Bluetooth speaker that I thought might be the issue) or jumping a bit ahead in the playlist. I also make sure to go to the archived show directly versus playing the live set and switching to an archived show (which works occasionally). Won’t stop me from enjoying KEXP but would love to see more refining of the playback of archived shows if possible! 🙏🏽 Thanks!

Charlesdan

Rating: 2/5

This is still a pretty not-so-great app. Picking shows is weird. Should just be able to pick the show and move on, like SoundCloud. Jumping to a specific time is just odd since the easier thing to use is a timeline with a playhead, like most music players. Even on WiFi the stream being interrupted by changing g the time seems to take forever. You need to wait for the app catch up and then play music before you decide to jump out of the app to use another app. If you jump out, the app freezes. The old version from way back with fake pre-ios6 buttons was very very very bad. This version, as it was with the old version with “buttons”, functions on a simple stream. The app is deeply flawed and functions in as much as it would be a nice supplement to having a radio. It still seems like it’s a better idea to just make this app only play a live stream, and then make sure it can still play the stream if you open a different app at the same time. This is still a very good radio station but you would be better off trying not to do anything other than program great music and then play it live.

deekayw0n

Rating: 4/5

KEXP is awesome and the new iOS app is fantastic. The macOS app doesn’t have all the same bells and whistles but for the basic task of listening to live radio with track listing it’s got you covered! One quirk I hope developers might fix. This app lets you pause and continue to play from the same location you paused. I sometimes find myself hours behind what is live and reflected as the current track. There are two small UI changes that could dramatically improve this experience: (1) a “Go Live” option that re-syncs with the track listing and what is currently on air AND (2) a mechanism to know which track is playing when you are not listening live (i.e. showing the track in the history in a different color maybe). Absent these features, it can be a bit difficult to know what you are listening to is not live and find the right track id….even closing and reopening the app the usual mac way won’t necessarily correct your position in the stream, requiring a user to kill a “Runner” app that is spawned in the background to get back to live music.