• NPR Music app on iPhone – a mixed bag

    Larry Karnowski Posted On October 30, 2012
    0


    I recently took the NPR Music App for a spin on my iPhone. Here’s what I found.

    The Good:

    • There is what looks like thousands of hours of great music and music podcasts both curated with loving detail and available for streaming straight from your phone.
    • A fun & easy to use user interface for browsing all that content.
    • Full episodes of Thistle & Shamrock! Woohoo!

    The Bad:

    • The actual streaming interface is very weak. You can basically control only the volume, and that’s it.
    • Wait, what? You don’t remember where I was in that 1-hour podcast I was just listening to? Really?
    • Panning through a 1-hour podcast is painful and clumsy. You can only hit about a five minute granularity.

    The Ugly:

    • Driving around town (with four+ bars of cell service) causes the streaming to stop… very often!
    • When the streaming stops, it completely forgets where I was and makes me have to restart from the beginning or try to pan to where I was, with its terrible panning control… while driving!
    • So, basically this app is unusable while driving, making it significantly less useful to me.

    The bottom line — lots of potential here, but please get your tech together, NPR.

    (Also posted on HickoryWind.org.)




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