14 DAY TRIAL // Listening to music over the Internet is not news anymore. Any user with a computer connected to the Internet and good searching skills can achieve this. The Web is crawling with radio stations and your only concern is how to listen to the right one.
Playing the online radios is a mere issue of electing the right software to do it with. Winamp is equipped with an extensive list of online radios and I think it is among the most used players for this activity. However popular Winamp is, there is a myriad of other applications out there specially designed for playing online radios.
Radiojockey is just one of them. The application is absolutely free of charge (with the advertising banners; if you want them excluded from the interface, then paying a fee of approximately $13 is necessary) and the one thing that stands out in this software is the ample list of radio stations it incorporates. There are 9498 radio stations available in the version I am testing, but more items can be added.
The interface is plain and simple and you can clearly see that the developer did not spend too much time designing it. But its functionality and list of options is more important than the looks as you are definitely not going to spend all day staring at its looks.
Once installed (it takes under one minute to do this) the program will set itself in the system tray and wait for your commands. One problem with the installation: despite the fact that I set Program Files as the installation folder of the application, it disregarded my wish and created a folder in the root of my system drive.
The context menu of the icon allows you to make the interface visible or hide it with no fuss. One quite disturbing aspect about the main window of the program is that there is a bit of difficulty in moving it around your desktop. There is no title bar to drag it by and only the thin blue border, the time seek bar (if you are in radio mode) and the blank spot under Options menu can be used for this operation.
The menus are displayed quite inconveniently in the left hand side of the application window. From the beginning, you will have a comprehensive list of online radios and all you have to do is click the Play button located in the lower part of the window. The radio stations are displayed alphabetically and additional information will tell you about the genre of the music and bitrate.
A very interesting option is Recording. Radiojockey allows its users to record directly onto the hard drive the music on the radio. The big red button at the bottom of the screen is the way to start the recording session. The files are stored in the default folder that can be found by taking a look in the Options menu (you can change it into a more "surface" location). Radiojockey automatically saves the recording under MP3 extension so you can play the audio file in any player you want.
Despite the utility of the option let us not forget that the recording is done from an online radio and a speedy Internet is required.
If there are some radio stations you find worthy of listening to later, you can add them in your favorite list. Be careful and do not add too many files in there. I made this mistake and added a couple of hundreds radio stations. The only way to clear the list is by manually remove them (no Shift selection is supported).
Besides playing the online radios, Radiojockey can also be used as a regular audio player. The only trouble is that it supports only MP3s. Creating playlists is a cinch, but there could be problems in here as well. All the playlists must have different names, even if you delete them. During our test, we created a playlist, named it Softpedia and loaded x, y and z MP3s. After playing the files, we deleted the playlist content and added other files (no trouble here). Next we deleted both the files and the playlist and tried to create another playlist with the same name. Big surprise as the x, y and z MP3s were there (couldn't be played because they were deleted from the computer as well).
The Good
Impressing list of radio stations. You will find radio streams from all over the world, from China to Columbia.
Radiojockey supports playing MP3 files and creating playlists.
Recording option comes in very handy sometimes.
The Bad
It would have been nice if the user could have had a better management tool of the radio stations.
The software will install in the root of the system folder, despite my express specification.
There are is a weird combination between English and German during the installation and uninstalling of the application.
Some streams do no work.
The Truth
Radiojockey is a noble cause, but the impressing number of radio stations included does not compensate all the trouble the user could go through when searching for a certain radio station and adding it in the main window.
The software is free so go ahead and try it for yourselves.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
