Description

The two screens that you can see above are everything that there is to this app, I told you it’s simple! The playback screen offers all common controls, it shows the currently running track, play/pause, volume and an airplay control. Additionally the stream can be refreshed with the top right navbar icon. The top left navbar item opens the settings view, where one of the two default stations (that I listen to 99% of the time) can be selected. Additionally the url of the stream can also be altered here. There is also the possibility to add a third generic station through any compatible stream URL.

When the app opens, the station immidiately starts playing and loads the current title information. There is also shortcut support, so the app can conveniently be started through Siri. And thats it, it plays radio!

History

I was using the radio.de app for a long time to listen to the radio. To be honest it is not a good looking app, but it was working fine for me for a long time. But someday it stopped loading the stream reliably, which was really annoying! So what would a sane person do in such a situation? Search for a new radio app, I mean there are plenty in the AppStore. Of course I did not do that, but instead set out to create a simple one myself.

I got the stream url by digging through the web player on the website of the radio station, it took some time but actually was quite fun. I got the first version working pretty quickly after that, but why stop there. Information about the currently playing song is also available on the stations website, so I added support for that to the app too. I first just crawled the website, which somehow did not feel right so I started digging deeper. I then found out that there actually is an API for requesting now playing info directly.

While doing so I also discovered that there seems to be an association of local radio stations (NRW-LOKALRADIOS) that provide a common backend for all radio stations in the region. You could switch the station by simply changing the station id in the URL, nice! This also showed me that all of these stations are playing the same music most of the time, just some shows and news content are seperate. Who would have thought…