Mini-review: myTuner Radio

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Arriving as a 'Universal' app on Windows Phone and perhaps working better on the desktop than it does on the mobile device, myTuner Radio promises much but delivers a fractured, fragmented, distorted and incomplete vision of Internet radio and podcasting. See below for my brief review and thoughts...

From the Store description:

More than 120 countries and 30,000 radio stations available in our application, from sports to news and music and many others to choose from. More than 1 million Podcasts to listen for free with rankings per country.

myTuner Radio is the best way to listen to the radio on your WindowsPhone. Now you can listen the best radio stations of your country or of your homeland when you are abroad. 

Our 10 Million user community trust us to get the best experience to listen to public internet radio streams.

myTuner Radio gives you the best experience in what comes to listening to worldwide radios stations.

Quite a few mentions of the word 'best' in there. Hmm.... I'd disagree. Here's my walkthrough:

Screenshot, myTuner RadioScreenshot, myTuner Radio

'Connected via Wifi'? I've NEVER seen this pop-up on a Windows Phone application before. The first hint that this application is built on middleware and isn't anywhere near as well optimised as a 'traditional' Silverlight (etc) app; (right) it's on with the panorama of stations. So far so good, but the fonts and screen elements all look 'wrong', as if they're merely mimicking Windows Phone controls rather than using standard components....

Screenshot, myTuner RadioScreenshot, myTuner Radio

Heading into Planet Rock, which played fine, even if there's a lot of wasted space and zero information about the currently playing track... (right) it's easy to add stations to your myTuner Radio favourites list...

Screenshot, myTuner RadioScreenshot, myTuner Radio

An Android-style slide-out menu offers app-wide modules and functions, oddly all are greyed out all the time. They still work, but it's odd.... (right) searching for 'BBC' didn't give me many options, this is a very cut down selection of stations.

Screenshot, myTuner RadioScreenshot, myTuner Radio

The I started listening to more stations. Or at least trying to. Many gave me 'buffering', many others simply resulted in the app 'spinning' forever...

Screenshot, myTuner RadioScreenshot, myTuner Radio

Then there are audio problems, with horrible overloading distortion and break-up on most stations I tried (presumably some kind of audio effect/amplication or compression is being tried), or at worst case in the station itself being unavailable.

Screenshot, myTuner RadioScreenshot, myTuner Radio

Some basic help text on the internal web page; (right) the podcast section sounded interesting, but the catalog was very incomplete. No AAWP? Fail(!)

Look, I get it, keeping an Internet Radio client going isn't trivial and there are lots of things that could put a spanner in the works. But myTuner Radio goes off the rails at every single opportunity. At least it's (currently) free, in case you want to try all this for yourself.

Source / Credit: Windows Phone Store