Friday, February 23, 2024

New radio streaming iOS app - Sound Salvation

The name is inspired by a line from Elvis Costello's song "Radio Radio". I like to listen to radio in an earpiece when I wake during the night. Where I live there is no FM (or DAB+) and the house interferes with AM reception so I've been trying various radio streaming apps.

The apps I've tried are often very annoying in one way or another. Some force ads on the listener - one even made me watch a full screen video ad after a while. Many have various types of in-app purchases or subscriptions.

Sound Salvation is low cost (AU$2). It doesn't collect any information on users. It doesn't show any ads in the app. The radio station directory comes from https://www.radio-browser.info/ which has over 46,000 stations in its database. The only monitoring the app does is to send a "click" to Radio Browser for each play of a station for their popularity ranking.

You can add your own station if you know the streaming URL. The app also supports a URL Scheme so that opening a URL on device like the following one will add a station to the list.

soundsalvation://add/?title=Radio%20National%20Sydney&url=http%3A%2F%2Flive-radio01.mediahubaustralia.com%2F2RNW%2Fmp3%2F 




Being a brand new app I decided to use the very latest Apple technology so it's built in SwiftUI and uses SwiftData for the database. The experience was a very smooth one but means that the app requires iOS 17 and above and I know that's a problem for some people with older devices.

Like all good apps, I wrote this for myself. If you want to stream radio, please give it a go.

Update

Well, I'm slightly boggled to see that currently Sound Salvation is the number 1 paid app in the Entertainment category.


Just ahead of "iFart" and that's undoubtedly a high bar. ;-)

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