App Review: StreamFurious
Posted by Androidster on Thursday, February 26, 2009
Under: Apps
If you’ve ever tried out online streaming music, chances are you've heard of SHOUTcast. For those of you who haven't, it’s an online media streaming service developed by Nullsoft with over 20,000 radio stations. With numerous genres and sub-genres to choose from, users are able to listen to pretty much any kind of music they want using their favorite media application.
As people slowly transition away from the desktop and start going mobile, services like SHOUTcast start to lose their appeal. If you don’t have a smartphone with a great web browser and media player, you most likely don’t have many options for streaming music. This is where StreamFurious comes in.
StreamFurious puts SHOUTcast and all of its music channels on your G1 or Android devices. It’s a fairly basic application that doesn’t require much of your handset to run. Not too heavy with graphics, it does exactly what you expect. When you open the app, you get around 40-50 channels to choose from. Among them, you’ll find ESPN, BBC, NPR, and more. The bit rates vary from channel to channel, but there isn't much difference in the quality using my G1. It’s a different story on a PC or with a really good set of headphones. If you pull up a search for different stations or genres, the app opens your web browser and you have access to essentially everything SHOUTcast offers. The cool thing is when you click to listen to a station, it goes back into StreamFurious to play it. As you play a station, you see a running total of bandwidth and how much data is transferring. It indicates how much has streamed, none of the data is stored and you don't even need to have a SD card to use the program.
As Android evolves and ends up on other hardware configurations, I could see this app working well on devices like Touch Revolution’s NIMble. Set something like that next to your bed and stream music over your WiFi connection. Or put it in the kitchen and listen your favorite talk radio while you do the dishes.
According to the guys at StreamFurious, there will be a pro version coming out soon (no details).
StreamFurious puts SHOUTcast and all of its music channels on your G1 or Android devices. It’s a fairly basic application that doesn’t require much of your handset to run. Not too heavy with graphics, it does exactly what you expect. When you open the app, you get around 40-50 channels to choose from. Among them, you’ll find ESPN, BBC, NPR, and more. The bit rates vary from channel to channel, but there isn't much difference in the quality using my G1. It’s a different story on a PC or with a really good set of headphones. If you pull up a search for different stations or genres, the app opens your web browser and you have access to essentially everything SHOUTcast offers. The cool thing is when you click to listen to a station, it goes back into StreamFurious to play it. As you play a station, you see a running total of bandwidth and how much data is transferring. It indicates how much has streamed, none of the data is stored and you don't even need to have a SD card to use the program.
As Android evolves and ends up on other hardware configurations, I could see this app working well on devices like Touch Revolution’s NIMble. Set something like that next to your bed and stream music over your WiFi connection. Or put it in the kitchen and listen your favorite talk radio while you do the dishes.
According to the guys at StreamFurious, there will be a pro version coming out soon (no details).
In : Apps
Tags: "android apps"
