How Can One Listen to Radio on the iPad?

06 Jul 2010 | Apps | Angela Topchu on Google+

Unlike iBook, iPod application on the iPad does not offer the opportunity to listen to Internet radio. Is there any way to solve this problem?

Yes, there definitely is one. Even though with iPad’s iPod app you can’t listen to radio online via the Radio entry in iTunes’ Source list, which is what you usually do in Mac, there is a way out.

In fact, there is a wide variety of iPad apps allowing one to stream online radio broadcasts and it should be said that the list of those broadcasts will be considerably longer than that in iTunes.

The reason is simple: many of those apps use RadioTime, which is a service with a database of well over 60,000 radio stations, among which one can find both terrestrial and Internet-based ones. With these apps you can search for stations sorting them by genres, bit-rate, call letters, radio hosts, show names, etc.

There are tons of apps of this kind available on the Net  I myself stick to $2 Spark Radio and $7 WunderRadio at my iPad, both using the abovementioned RadioTime database. Both have similar feature lists: they show stations located near you, sort them by genre, allow searching for stations.

One of the few areas in which they significantly differ is WunderRadio’s pop-over menu, which looks a little more attractive than Spark Radio’s button-based one.

However, there is one problem with all those iPhone and iPad radio apps it’s that the sound just disappears when you switch away from the application. Hopefully, as soon as iOS 4 allows background apps, this problem will be resolved. Of course, it won’t come to iPad straight away you will probably need to wait until this fall when its version of iOS 4 is released.

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