Expert: Werner "Menneisyys" Ruotsalainen

Have you ever wanted to listen to radio stations on the Net? With

1. the advent of the pre-3G technology EDGE, which, with most network operators, is sufficient for listening to most (if not all) radio stations on the Net (let alone 3G, of course),
2. the proliferation of unlimited data contracts
3. and, last but in no way least, the really revolutionary, bandwidth-saving, "high-quality stereo even over slow GPRS connections" AAC+v2 (also known as HE-AACv2, aacPlus2 etc.) streams becoming common,

they have become accessible to almost everyone with a connected mobile device (for example, a mobile phone) on both the Windows Mobile and the Symbian platform. (Note that the final version of the article / chart will also have extensive info on the seriously enhanced Pocket Tunes 4.0 on the Palm OS – that is, it’ll cover no less than THREE mobile operating systems!)

In my forthcoming article, I discuss for example the following questions:

1. What radio stations there are?
2. How you can access them?
3. What should you pay attention to, depending on whether you’re on an unlimited contact, and/or super-slow GPRS connections?
4. Which radio client to choose, depending on your needs?

[More:]

Note that I still haven’t decided whether I should publish the Multimedia Streaming Bible as a separate entity, or, part of my (even larger) Multimedia Bible. There are both pros and cons in both approaches:

Pros:

1. I can publish it in the next one or two days – you don’t need to wait some 1-2 additional weeks for the Bible to be, finally, published
2. Separating these pretty disjunctive subjects greatly help in reducing the size of the Multimedia Bible. This would be pretty much welcome as it’s going to be BIG. Very big.

Cons:

1. It’ll miss a lot of information I’ll only give you in the “big” Multimedia Bible like equalizer support, hardware button support, alarm / sleep shutdown functionality, screen dimming etc. That is, the Streaming Bible will only contain information strictly related to audio streaming and will not contain other info, which may make it easier to choose from the given apps. (This missing info, however, WILL be present in the final Multimedia Bible – sometimes later.)

And yes, before I forget about it: HERE’S THE CHART. Do check it out, do comment it, do send me flames and/or greetings. And, do enjoy the information not readily available anywhere else - for example, many people have been hunting for an AAC+-capable player for ages (see for example THIS). Yes, noone has actually published a tutorial on what players are able to play these streams.

It contains both protocol compliance reports, battery life-related remarks (with Windows Mobile, in CPU usage percentage; with Symbian, in Watts) and some other goodies like whether they’re able to record the radio stream.

Again and again, as has already been pointed out above, the chart mostly contains strictly (audio) streaming-related info. That is, I haven’t for example elaborated on stuff that I’ll discuss in the final Multimedia Bible. Subjects like these are equalizers, button handling, AVRCP compliance etc. I’ve mentioned SOME of these in the Pros / Cons rows at the bottom but, except for the links, the price and the MOST important compatibility information (for example, Mundu Radio’s not really supporting (W)VGA Pocket PC’s). These questions will ALL be covered in the chart targeted at the wider audience (not only those that want a radio client).

Also note that I don’t discuss Orb and the like in here; they’ll only be elaborated on in the final Multimedia Bible. The same stands for video streaming, LAN access and UPnP. With this Bible, my “only” aim is to give you a complete picture of listening to the already existing, remote radio stations on the Net.