Waaaaaaaaaait. So if I have an iPod Touch (2G) and I have a 20 minute commute to work, I can load up some new music as I walk out the door and listen on the way to work in the car?

I wish Pandora had that. Wow. That is truly amazing.

skaorsk8

@jeffeb3: Apple appears to currently disallow podcast apps. See here for the sad story: [www.tuaw.com]

aj_robins

Pandora can't play in the background, like say, while you are playing a game on the bus.

Has anyone made an app to download and play pod casts on the iPhoney yet? I want one, and I want it now.

jeffeb3

I doubt you can buffer more than a couple minutes. Can anyone confirm what the buffer maxes out at?

jkrell

@jkrell: From what I remember seeing last night while I was playing with FlyCast it buffered up to 6 minutes of music. I'll have to play around with it again when I get home.

DahCheet

@aj_robins: That's really unfortunate - I could see how such an app would increase the appeal of the phone that much more. True, I guess you can preload podcast content when you sync; but the availability of on-the-fly selectivity would be great.

DaiWalka

This is looking like a really good replacement for the Tuner app that I had been using. Just playing around with the KQED (local NPR) feed, it looks like if you turn off "conserve battery" it will buffer quite a lot while paused (I let it go up to 10 minutes). With the battery conservation feature turned on it tops out the buffer at 2 minutes, lets it run down, then re-buffers. What I really like is that for some feeds (such as KQED) you can tell it to skip back to the top of the hour, at which point it rapidly buffers all the content since then. That will allow me to listen uninterrupted going through subway tunnels, etc. on the commute home.

Also, I don't know whether it was just due to a network hiccup, but I wasn't able to get the stream to connect until I created a FlyCast account and logged in. The connection test is also inaccurate in my case (connected via WiFi and streaming successfully, but the test reports barely any connection).

rdo

@rdo:

I also was unable to get a stream to play until I created an account.

token1

Sounds like a cool app. How long til Apple bans it? Any bets?

smartboydan hates college

I note that the audio quality with FlyCast over a WiFi connection is considerably better than Simplify.

As a matter of fact, I have FlyCast for one radio station: KDFC (San Francisco's classical station) because FlyCast's fidelity is better than that of the FM signal.

If there is a terrestrial broadcaster that you like that happens to be on FlyCast's list of sources, it is totally worth it. It's free anyhow.

Deprong Mori

Seems cool but I'll stick with Pandora in the wild. And Remote when I'm at home. And Simplify when I'm not at home.

John_001

@smartboydan hates college:

There's no plausible reason why Apple would ban this app. It's just another Internet radio tuner. In some ways, one that's more clever than other offerings, but it doesn't seem to be breaking the terms of service.

Deprong Mori

you can listen to shoutcast streams too! woot! check out poprock80s.com and listen for yourself.

Tank

FYI for any Finetune users, the Finetune webapp is very good and runs in the background as well.

Kajo

what i would really like is an app that streams bbc radio4 on the ipod. nothing does so far as i know (bbc use crappy real player to stream). Anyone else know if it possible to do this?

FoxA2

im guessing your limited to the streams preset in the app? -- i'm looking for an app that will play streaming audio via a .m3u file

mrjoshyman