Your perfect radio station
What would your perfect radio station look like? It would probably include you favorite music along with news on your interests, sports reports about your favorite team and weather from your area all without any commercials. It certainly wouldn't look like commercial radio with it's tiny number of tracks in rotation and lots of ads. But it also wouldn't be your portable media player, which only plays music and the occasional podcast. While driving and traveling I end up listening to my portable media player and when I am at my desk I listen my music collection on my computer. That's great for listening to music, but find I can end up feeling disconnected from daily events when I don't listen to the news. Enter new website byo.fm. The idea behind it is simple -- a radio station that is tailored for you; your music, your news, your region, your interests and do it without any commercials.
I've been playing around with BYO for over a month and while it isn't perfect yet, it is good and I listen to it regularly. In fact, the idea makes so much sense, yet seems so simple and straightforward that I wish I would have come up with it first!
Here's how it works: BYO has a simple signup process where you choose your news, weather and local TV stations. You add your own music by uploading it to the site. Once you've selected your content, BYO mixes it up and plays it like a radio station. You hear a few of your songs followed by a news break from CNN, NPR, Fox or one of their other news providers. A podcast from ESPN will be mixed in. They even have a robotic voice that will read text from other websites, Stephen Hawking style.
The result is a radio station that at times is close to my perfect radio station.
That's the good. Now for the bad. There are several fairly minor issues that add up to a significant annoyance factor with the site:
- The site's audio player freezes occasionally, forcing a refresh of the page.
- The playlists on the site can be repetitive. I have had it try to play the same "ESPN daily" podcast for me three times in an afternoon.
- The site has a 2 GB limit for the music you can upload by default. The music portion of the site is powered by another product from the same company, mp3tunes.com, which does support unlimited music storage, for a fee.
- In order to upload music, you have to download an app first. You can use the BYO station builder app or the mp3tunes music sync app.
- Both the BYO app and the MP3Tunes apps are finicky. They both crashed on me several times before finally succeeding.
- Uploading takes a long time. MP3Tunes now has a free 10 GB plan. Uploading all of my four-star-and-higher-rated mp3s (about 8.5 GB) took over 10 hours, when it finally did succeed.
- The player apps let you upload protected WMAs that it can't stream (they just don't play). That means you have to make sure not to upload them.
- The tracks that are displayed on BYO only show the most basic metadata and are missing album art, even though the website seems to have a place for it in its user interface.
- Both uploader apps don't warn you when you have too much music. They seem to just upload until they are full.
- The website itself looks pretty plain.
All of those gripes haven't stopped me from using BYO. As they are fixed and improved the site will continue to get better. It is a pleasure when it is working well and mixing music with news without crashes. I definitely wouldn't hesitate to recommend the site to anyone who wants some news mixed into their daily listening.
- What does your perfect radio station look like?
- Can BYO do it?
- What else is BYO missing?
Tell me below in the comments.
Links:
