{"id":14972,"date":"2010-03-19T18:43:08","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T18:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.razorianfly.com\/?p=14972"},"modified":"2010-03-24T21:33:30","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T21:33:30","slug":"spark-radio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/19\/spark-radio\/","title":{"rendered":"Spark Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the many glaring omissions on the iPhone is the fact there is still no FM tuner built-in. Like most things which don’t come out of the box though, the App Store is always on hand to fill the gap. Developed by Handcast Media Labs<\/a>, Spark Radio is an application which works over Wi-Fi, 3G and Edge networks and allows users to stream over 10,000 radio stations from all over the world, allowing them to listen to them directly on their iPhone. The app claims to be the only premiere iPhone app which features visually stunning graphics.
\nSo, How does the app play out? Well, opening the app for the first time you’ll be greeted with the ‘Stations’ screen. This screen is split into two sections. The first houses options to goto your favorites, recents, search or add a station and access the ‘spark community’ which we’ll get into a bit later. The second section houses options to see music by genre, see local stations available around you, view sportscasts and sports talk and listen to Talk radio.<\/p>\n

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During my time with the app I tried out and streamed a good few stations, including my local beloved WIRE.FM<\/a>, and of course BBC Radio 1. After a 5-7 second buffer time on each stream in which the app was obviously opening the stream, the streams connected .. for the most part. I found that while local radio stations seemed to continuously buffer every few seconds, Radio 1 and other well known radio stations seemed to stream just fine. Because of this, I’m putting this down to my location at the time of testing. The main selling point of the app however, is the fact that it has a visualizer which goes alongside it. If you’ve ever had a chance to hit View > Visualizer in iTunes, you’ll know visualizer the stuff made of awesome. To activate the visuals in the app you simply tap the ‘Visuals’ tab in the center of the bottom tool bar. <\/p>\n

With Handcast Media Labs also being the developers behind the spiral art app Pixi, Spark Radio seems to convert graphics and visuals of the same nature. On the visual side, the app will display an iTunes-like visualizer type graphics and react along with the radio station you’re currently listening to. Whats more the visuals will respond to two touch gestures; tap and drag or a two finger slide. Tapping and dragging result sin a few trippy effects while two finger sliding adds blur to the graphics. While good for the most part, I did find this to be a little buggy, with some of the graphics simply failing to load \u201d\u201c even when streaming a station.<\/p>\n

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The playing tab will display the current station you are listing to. Here you can see the name of the station or stream, play or pause the stream and adjust your device volume. tapping on the center box will give you more information of the station, including its source, location, ability to view the station’s website and see other stations similar to the one you’re listening to or investigating as well as add your own rating to the station. Really like a station and what you favorite it? Just hit the ‘Fav’ section located in the top right. The station will automatically be added to your ‘Favorites’ section on the ‘Stations’ tab.<\/p>\n

The settings tab houses a good few features which should keep you busy. The pane is split up into 3 parts; General, Tuner and Visualizer. In general, you’ll see you have the ability to turn auto tune on on start up, see the visualizer when tuned, show the status bar (disabling saves space) and use bar-style EQ. In tuner, you can set the station directory order, turn persistent retry on for failed connections, and set stream buffer time (increasing this avoids playback issues). Finally in the visualizer pane, you have the options to show visualizer help, allow reverse palettes, auto switch modules (shake the visuals up with the music) and set primary module switch time, extension switch time, palette switch time and set your device’s screen sleep delay.<\/p>\n

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Spark Community<\/h3>\n

Here’s were the application gets really interesting. The Spark community is the app’s own social network based of radio stations you and other users are listening to. Tapping the option from the ‘Stations’ tab will ask you to sign up and register for the service. Sign up took less than 30 seconds and involved me creating both a username and stating my current location. Once signed up, you can then view a 3D globe of Spark Radio users much like Ocarina from Smule. The best bit is you can tune into what other Spark users are listening to with the tap of your finger. The app will display the last 5 stations Spark users connected to and tapping on any one of them and tapping ‘Tune’ will tune you into that station, no matter where it is on earth. <\/p>\n

Overall, while I found Spark Radio’s social features a treat alongside the actual radio aspect, the built-in visuals and intermittent error ‘Unable to Tune Stream’ tended to dampen my spirits about the app. Its worth noting that the company states in a future update the app will gain the ability to:<\/p>\n

– Import your own graphics and photos to customize the visualizer<\/p>\n

– Listen to the radio in the background while running other apps<\/p>\n

– Chat to other users who share the same taste in radio programming<\/p>\n

Spark Radio definitely has potential but currently I’d advise waiting for an update to fix some of these minor issues. <\/p>\n

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One of the many glaring omissions on the iPhone is the fact there is still no FM tuner built-in. Like most things which don’t come out of the box though, the App Store is always on hand to fill the gap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,16,17,2131],"tags":[2165,2164,2163],"class_list":["post-14972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-app-store","category-iphone","category-ipod","category-music-app-store","tag-1-99","tag-handscast-media-labs","tag-spark-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14972"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15777,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14972\/revisions\/15777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}