StreamS HiFi Radio

An audiophile quality HLS FLAC lossless and AAC player. Versatile. Also a useful tool for pros. No sign-in or account needed, no monthly fees, no busy screens with promotional junk. I like its clean look. This player can retrieve cover art using the station’s artist and title info, even if the station isn’t sending cover art data. Looks cool on the dashboard. I can drive around town and thanks to HLS, can listen to lossless or AAC encoded streams without dropouts using this player on my iPhone with CarPlay. Tip: For best quality, connect with a cable to avoid additional Bluetooth lossy compression. I also like that you can find a stream’s bitrate and other tech info on the player’s “Geek Info” page. Now, here’s a more technical part of my review from my perspective as a broadcast engineer. The StreamS HiFi Radio player is from the same company that makes the excellent standards-based streaming encoders that my stations use, so they definitely get the player right. It supports xHE-AAC, which delivers surprising quality at low bitrates. When using cellular, the player conserves data usage by selecting the lowest available bitrate, and when on WiFi picks the highest rate for best quality. A feature, not a bug. (Most HLS streams have different bitrate streams available for the same program.) Of course, if you select a lossless stream, it plays lossless, even if using cellular. And if you want to always play a particular high bitrate stream, you can custom-enter the URL of the desired bitrate HLS variant, and save it to Favorites, as I have done for our dozens of variants. Sure, you will have to know this info, but some broadcasters publish it on their websites, or you could ask them. In addition to providing high quality entertainment that is beyond broadcast quality, it’s a reference-quality player. It’s an accurate and useful tool for me, since it can show technical details of the streams. I purchased it personally (for me, it’s worth many times its price), and I was not compensated for this review.

I’ve own this app for over 10 years. It’s one of the best. It’s my goto music app for live radio. Great audio quality and very reliable. It works really well with CarPlay and Siri, the best so far.

I like the updated version of this app. Lower loading times easier to access the map and it seems to support all the native codecs in the Apple OS. The main screen has a faster load time and larger icons. Good value for the money. Five stars.