Spark Radio aims to be THE internet radio app on your iPhone. Boasting a list of over ten thousand stations, Spark Radio comes with many different ways to search and find your favorite stations, and also discover some new ones along the way.
One of the best things about this app is how simple it is to find stations. You won ‘t have to go running to find some help manual in order to start jamming right away. One feature in particular left me a little confused, but that doesn ‘t take away from the fact that, at its core, Spark Radio is great music app.
When you open up the app for the first time, you ‘ll notice five sections down at the bottom, similar to the iTunes App Store. The default opened page is stations. From here, you can go to your list of favorite stations, check out the ones you recently listened to, search for stations by genre and location, and also enter the Spark Community (more on this later).
I started off by viewing my local stations, for which I had to allow the app to use my current location. I noticed that, while a few of the ones that I listen to in my car were missing, the vast majority were there. When you browse the list of stations, you ‘ll see its call letters, station number, and the current song information. Tap on a station to start listening to it and you ‘ll be taken to Playing, the second page. From here, you can add it to your list of favorites and view the station profile.
Searching for stations couldn ‘t be easier. There are a bunch of different genres in the app, so you ‘ll have no problem finding a station that suits your musical tastes. It has hip-hop, adult contemporary, sports, talk, top 40, country, and much, much more. If you can ‘t find your favorite station, you can search for it or enter its stream URL to locate it.
The Spark Community is one of the things that left my scratching my head. As best as I can tell, its intended use is to see what people around you are listening to, allowing you to discover new stations. When you enter the community for the first time, you ‘ll be asked to create a username and enter your location. After that, you ‘ll see the globe with a green sphere showing your location. On the bottom right, you ‘ll see a list of everyone else in the community and what they ‘re listening to. Tap on their name and a blue sphere will appear on the globe to represent them, along with an option to start listening to their station. What confused me was, once in a while, tapping on someone ‘s name would yield a few different blue spheres. I wasn ‘t sure if that meant other people besides that person were listening to the station or what.
That ‘s about it as far as the Spark Community goes. There are no searching options that allow you to filter by state or region. It ‘s a very bare bones option, but it is in beta, after all. Even still, this feature has a lot of potential.
The third page is a visual page. This allows you to view some groovy and far-out graphics while you listen to your tunes. These graphics are touch sensitive, so it will be provide a little bit of amusement. I ‘ll skip over to the fifth page, which is a web browser. This is as simple and bare bones as you can get. Type in something to search – no, you can ‘t go directly to a webpage without searching for it first – and Google will pop up with your results. This is a cool feature if you need to look up something real quick, but with no bookmarks or landscape support, for example, this feature falls a little flat.
The fourth page is settings, and there are a few. You can change some general settings on the app (such as auto tune on startup), and also edit the tuner and visualizer. It ‘s interesting to note that the visualizer is pretty customizable, so if you ‘re into that, you ‘ll probably have fun playing around with the settings.
All-in-all, it ‘s hard to not be impressed with Spark Radio. It ‘s thorough, complete, easy-to-use, and fairly customizable. Its biggest drawback is its price. But if you are at all interested in listening to your favorite radio stations and discovering new ones on your iPhone, then Spark Radio is definitely worth a look.
Spark Radio is available now in the App Store for $5.99.
*** Handcast Media provided a promo code to Just Another iPhone Blog for the review of Spark Radio. For more information regarding our site ‘s review policies, please see the ‘About ‘ page. ***
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