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want to hear what’s on a station? Sit through a commercial. Oh...that station is awful. Let’s check another. Time to sit through another commercial! That station is offline, let’s check another! Time for a new commercial! Needless to say you will have listened to thirty minutes of awful commercials before finding a station you like. Once you do find a station you like, the commercials are at a vastly different volume level than the radio stations due to poor loudness normalization quality control. A good idea very very poorly executed. Another app designed to shove as many ads down people’s throats as possible.

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.

Brilliant idea, offering a window onto the world. And it generally works well — unless you want to stream to an AirPlay device. First, I’ve not found an obvious UI feature to send to AirPlay when you select a station — you either select AirPlay in a different audio app first, or you have to click the screen off and then off again, because the interface on the Lock Screen offers a way to select it. Second, once you do that, it still drops out frequently; and if you try streaming to two speakers at once, the sound stops entirely, though the app tells you it’s playing. Very, very frustrating. But if you don’t need AirPlay, this is a no-brainer.