App review: ooTunes Radio 2.1

Most would think that radio is dying out, but on the iPhone, it’s far from it. It’s no longer just traditional radio either – welcome to the age of digital media, which means that the radio has gone to the Internet. ooTunes is an app that brings you thousands of radio stations from all over the world to your fingertips, along with some beefy features.

From the home screen of the app, you have several options: Search all streams, favorites, recent, most played, custom tags, websites, bookmarks, web playlist, and Radio Roolette. When searching for a radio station, you can choose to search all of them at once, by genre, country, or US city. There’s a lot of stations to choose from, so I would recommend narrowing your search down by genre or city, if you know the station’s location.


Once you start listening to a station, you can add it to your favorites, email a link to the station (although it will quit the app and go to Mail), tweet about it, update Facebook status, tag the station, or bookmark the current track. There’s even a feedback button for FAQs, report broken streams, or visit the homepage of selected station. On the Now Playing screen, there’s also buttons for recently played tracks, lyrics, similar, and buy from iTunes. You can even pause stations, and select previous or next tracks when there’s playlists (presumably from the Media Server part of ooTunes).

Radio Roolette is a nifty little feature that will present a screen of songs that are currently playing on some stations. When you select a song to play, it will take you to that station’s stream. This is a pretty handy feature to discover new stations that you may (or not) like. It’s a hit or miss, hence the play on roulette. Either way, you’ll find tons of new music.

ooTunes also has a desktop app that lets you play your entire iTunes library on-the-go. If you’re interested in using this part of the iPhone app as well, you can do so at http://ootunes.com. This Media Server desktop app lets you listen to tracks in the background on the iPhone. This is great if you want to have your entire library on your iPhone and do other stuff at the same time.

Overall, this radio app is great for listening to tons of radio and Internet streams, and integrating social network features like Twitter and Facebook. Sometimes you’ll come across a stream that won’t connect, but that’s mainly on the end of the station (highly popular stations only allow a certain amount of listeners, so connecting depends on how much they can handle). This is a great radio app for the low cost of $3.99 (when compared to others such as WunderRadio, which has a $6.99 price tag) and is a must have for any music-enthusiast.