Radio Garden Live

Update: Thank You for this! What I need is a way, besides ranking, to deal with my hundreds, and growing, of Favorites. All I have ‘sample’ is Germany, Netherlands and some Belgium and there are many, many more dots and there is no way, that I’ve found anyway, to know from the globe what you have visited already. The easiest thing, I think, would be to have the dot stay white. If you revisited then it would do the black/white flip in reverse. Easy way to know you been there. Then have a reset button so you could start over. Just a thought. This app is so good. And I’m picking up a few words along the way on the pop stations. :-) I’m having as much fun as with Pixel Pro Baseball. :-) —- Update: ok, I subscribed. After hours riding the time machine of Life and throughly enjoying myself remembering loves, friends, things and machines with a joyful tear in my eyes. The Isle of Man, Iceland, Malta and many more to live. —- The globe is sooo much better than frequency listings! I’m old school weened on my father built Lafayette Radio starting at 9 years (1961). Standing on my tippy toes, on a stool, down in the family basement watching the red needle pulled along on a waxed string behind the frequency/station display. It was magic!! German, Italian, French and some I never figured out and the plethora of Mexican stations that, at dusk, changed their broadcast patterns to North/South. I would get cramps in my legs. I would close my eyes and ‘imagined’ what was being said or where it was or what their lives were like. Standing there in the basement with a kid and the World at his fingertips. It is magic, still, it’s magic! A station in Dresden is playing, now a favorite, in the background while I scribble (figuratively) this. I do miss digging the signals ‘out of the dirt’ (as we used to say). There was a satisfaction using USB on SSB or the notch/width filter. All those toys at one’s disposal. Excellent!

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.

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👊🏿👊🏿👊🏿👊🏿💯💯💯