Radio Garden

Originally from Kenya and through this app i am able to keep in touch with my home country and other neighboring countries in East Africa. Technologically this is the best means of getting the latest and greatest news from the entire globe. Hands down to the developers. Without this app, i would not have maintained the much needed contact with my home country. Very impressed with this app, i listen to my stations every freaking day. Night or day am always here streaming my favorite radio stations. As a dj also, it helps me learn what other people from different cultures listen to. Browsing through various cities, countries and radio stations. It gives me an immense sense of pride that i can learn more from others. Hence expanding my knowledge in Music. Big up Radio Garden. Long Live Radio Garden... Peace👊🏿👊🏿👊🏿👊🏿💯💯💯

Pros: Having now been through a few competing programs (looking for an alternative), I can say that RG unquestionably accesses the most stations, in a way that makes a lot of sense. Cons: Not so good if you don’t relate well to maps in the first place. If you’re the classic, “They couldn’t point to {x} on a map!”, welllllll…. that’s the user interface RG uses. Another problem I’ve run across: Because there are no accounts, every now and then my Favorites will disappear. I assume this is because they’re held in some local file. So not only do I have to recreate my Favorites on each device I use ( because, without accounts, they don’t propagate), not only are my lists different on each device ( see earlier point), sometimes I have to recreate my lists from scratch. This is not good. I think this must be a cost-saving method. No accounts means local storage, so no leases. But, really, guys…. Shell out the money for the 1 or 2U of rackspace it would take. At least from me, it would eliminate a lot of hassle, and it would earn that 5th star. ETA: Having switched from an iPad/7 to an iPad Air/5, the lack of a physical home button really makes a difference with this UI. I keep not flicking from the bottom fast enough, so the map interprets that as a change of town. I keep having to go back to Favorites, pick my station, then repeat. Stage Manager fixes this by having the selection windows to the side, but that seems a very brute force approach.

Radio Garden is fantastic, a wonderful way to explore world radio. One thing it taught me right away is how profound the hold American pop has on the entire world—as another reviewer said, it’s almost unbelievable the number of stations everywhere playing ‘today’s’ crappy, throwaway English-language dance-ish pop, and then you have nearly as many doing “Hits from the 80s” etc. Depressing. But if you’re diligent you can find all kinds of ear-opening stuff. Radio Garden needs: 1. Manual URL entry of new stations. It’s nice they have a ‘submit station’ form, but why not let me test the URL first—within the app—and why not give me immediate access to the feeds i want to listen to? The app could list manually-entered stations in the Favorites area. When you play a manually-entered station the app could display the station name in a special color and rotate the globe to some place out in the ocean—or just leave the globe as it is 2. Support for iPad screen sizes. Currently on iPad it runs as if it were on a phone, with that wide black border around the app. 3. Chinese and northern and central African stations. Where are they? 4. Tags/categories so stations can be grouped and selected for play by genre, language or whatever. We should likewise be able to order the station list in whatever order makes sense to the user.