RadioTuna: An Excellent Source For Electronic Music Radio Streams
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
A few months ago I was minding my own business, lurking on Twitter at work. I made the comment to my followers that I was currently listening to some minimal techno on DI.FM when I suddenly get the most random tell I had seen all day.
A fellow by the name of Will sent me an @message telling me that he and a group of developers were working on a new streaming radio service called RadioTuna.
He told me, if I wanted to, that he could give me a beta invite to check out the service and see what I thought about it. Of course I took him up on this deal.
What I found really surprised me.
RadioTuna is a web based streaming radio aggregator as you expect, similar to Last.fm and Pandora. What really set it apart upon exploring the interface was that it had a MASSIVE amount of Electronic Music streams.
Before, I was a bit dissapointed by the overall inclusion of Electronic Music on Pandora, it had the basic genres but seemed really limited as if they didn’t expect people to want to listen to these electronic genres – no surprise here as most radio doesn’t play electronic.
After about 5 minutes I was in love.
I was really blown away by the sheer amount of radio stations they had aggregated through the service, it seemed like hundreds for each sub genre.
I spent the next few hours just jumping back and forth between radio stations, seein what they had playing.
What I particularily liked about the service is that they have a small set of bars to indicate how dedicated the radio station is to the particular genre.
Although a station may be labeled as Hardstyle, it would sometimes play Gabber, this would show up on the bar to tell you that the station changed up from time to time – a pretty cool little feature.
The other thing I really liked about RadioTuna was that you could search for artists which would then be displayed as in search results of the current stations they are being played on. With the thousands of Electronic Music radio stations, I generally found a least a handful playing the artists I was searching for.
The next few days I continued to play with the interface until the point that I felt it would be nice to send some feedback. I sent over a polite email telling them some of the things I had problems with (having to use spaces in genres, the overlays of some of the interface and the player).
Eventually RadioTuna faded from my interest as I went back to DI.FM and the albums I already had on my computer until recently. I received an email from Will telling me how much he appreciated that I gave feedback and so I jumped back over to the site.
It’s really cool to see that they did take some of my feedback because the interface is very sleek now. The genres are divided up very accurately and there are still thousands of stations to choose from.
As an Electronic Music junkie, RadioTuna is becoming one of the top sites I visit in the morning to find music to play throughout the day.
DJs always need to be on the look out for new and exciting music. Some of the best places I have found new tracks were through radio stations, looking at the playlist notes and hearing exclusive dubplate spinning on a live show.
RadioTuna is still in beta at the moment but it’s already shaping up into something truly great. There are a few things that still need to be worked out but I dig it.
I suggest you bookmark this website whenever you get that itch to listen to some music. You’ll find just about every genre on there.
It’s not an overhyped service like Pandora, which I really like. It’s built by a small group of developers who really are dedicated to the music so big props to them.
I just wanted to share this with you.
Go take a look at RadioTuna and tell me what you think. Maybe leave some feedback for the team, let’s all pitch in together to make this a really great source for DJs to find new music and listen to the genres they love.
Tags: Streaming Radio
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