TuneIn Radio: Music & Sports

I’ve used this app for maybe a year now. While I still use it all day and it’s almost completely replaced my Pandora habits, there’s room for improvement. I’ve noticed that the “see more” option for podcasts lists often disappears, depending on the update. I’ll be able to see the podcasts’ earlier work one day but not the next, which is a shame because I binge them in order of release date. So I have to skip to something new if the backlog option disappears. Not that it’s fun hunting that deep, four to five clicks and scrolls just to restart where I was is annoying. I’ve also noticed that once in a while if I pause the podcast or switch to external speakers/blue tooth tools, that whatever I’m listening to gets this stuttering/screech noise anywhere from 5 to 45 seconds. I have to back track and retry that section. This used to happen a lot on audio books but I don’t notice it on podcasts as much. Or with “live” shows. I really wish I could speed up books, like other apps, “1.5 the normal speed” would be great. Finally, the app never accurately remembers what I’ve listened to (completion of a a track) or where I’m at in a chapter or book. It constantly says I’ve only partially finished books because it forgets everything. I usually have to hunt for where I last was - a completely nightmare for something like IT.... gotta scroll forever to find the last chapters anyway. Sounds like a lot of stuff, and it is, but it’s little stuff. The sheer variety of items I can listen to makes up for it.

I stream radio content constantly throughout the day. Streaming with iTunes would produce frequent buffering, starting and stopping, skipping back and forth for the first ten minutes of any new stream. TuneIn produces a much cleaner stream. It has solved all my problems, even where reception is intermittently degraded, but. . . I’m frustrated by Tune In’s sloppy button placement and library features. First the button placement: by placing suggested channels at the bottom of the play window, I’m constantly inadvertently clicking on one of these random channels, when then appear in my library where inadvertently select them again. I have Tune In expressly so that I can listen to NPR, both my home station without constant buffering and occasionally to west coast NPR stations so that I can hear the new later than is available. With TuneIn’s sloppy interface, I’m often clicking on random stations that I don’t have any interest in. It is very very frustrating, especially when I’m in the middle of an important story. I also wish TuneIn would implement a fast backward button so that I could quickly replay a detail that I might have missed. And finally, TuneIn needs and Apple Watch app.

I commented a year ago in agreement with others from several years before that about the “Here’s something you might have missed” audio repeats multiple times per hour (that is, if you listen to a one hour show, you can’t possibly miss it the second, third, fourth time. That is far more annoying than hearing commercials! The author asked for my email address to discuss (as if they were being responsive to a paying customer) and proceeded to take the conversation outside the Apple store. They then ask me what programs I was listening to and came back with a dismissive, “that’s how it normally works” non-response. I know that’s how it works, but it should be fixed, not excused! Paying over $100 / year should justify updating the app to address these repeated subscriber complaints, not keep adding more channels I don’t care about to allow them keep signing up new users. I signed up on their site using PayPal, not through Apple, so I couldn’t unsubscribe via iOS or PayPal directly. After having to hear an accused murderer testify about his bloody wife and son he was on trial for shooting over and over in one hour, I had enough (again), but still hadn’t been able to identify how to cancel the annual auto-pay renewal before it just went through PayPal and now it can’t be cancelled for another year. I will be contacting the authors to ask for a refund if they still won’t fix the repeat content bug (it’s certainly NOT a feature worth paying for.)