What the Tech: App of the Day, Radio Garden
AUGUSTA, Ga. (WRDW/WAGT) - Streaming is the most popular way for people to listen to music.
Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Pandora, and YouTube Music are great apps to listen to the tunes you’re looking for, but discovering new music isn’t always easy.
Those apps use algorithms to push music your way that they think you’ll like, based on your listening history.
What generally happens over time is that you continue seeing music of the same genres and artists. radio?
You may have some stations programmed into your car, but listening to radio stations on your phone is likely an afterthought.
Radio Garden is a way to listen to any radio station from anywhere in the world for free.
A non-profit app from a company in Amsterdam, Radio Garden appears on the screen as a 3D globe with thousands of green dots.
Each green dot is a radio station broadcasting live. By spinning the globe and zooming into a country or city, you can choose which station to tune into.
As a fan of all types of music, we’ve enjoyed Radio Garden more than any of the various streaming apps as we can discover music and bands we’d never even heard about.
For example, for St. Patrick’s Day, we zoomed into Glenisland, Ireland to listen to a local broadcast from a station that plays traditional Irish music.
Spinning the globe again, we found reggae stations in Nigeria, Brazil, and even Moscow.
The city of Lyon, has over a dozen radio stations playing different genres.
There are blues, soul, funk, reggae, pop, country, and jazz to select from stations playing music, uninterrupted by commercials.
Other stations we’ve found play beach music from A1A, a local station in Greenland that plays just about anything, and heavy metal stations in . If you’ve got a favorite sports team, we suggest tuning into a sports talk station from the area.
You’ll hear commercials from those stations and there are some pop-up ads in the app but other than that, it’s a good dose of music from those regions.
The app is free to use but a few bonus features such as timers that turn off the music automatically and no pop-up ads cost about $25 a year to help fund the app. You can also listen online in a web browser at www.radio.garden.
The app is available for iPhone and Android devices.
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