Radio Cloud, below, gives you access to a menuof genres and countriesfor 99 cents.
You may be an Anglophile or a Francophile, or simply interested in news and views from around the world. Smartphone applications put international radio at your fingertips.
TuneIn Radio, free from TuneIn Inc., comes in versions for devices of all kinds. Hear thousands of stations and millions of podcasts, from every continent, including the Web-station outpost playing folk music the other evening from windswept Snow Hill Island, Antarctica.
Pick your stations on TuneIn by geography, format, or genre. There's also a "trending" option to see what's popular with other users. The $4.99 upgrade - a "Pro" version available for Android, Apple, and BlackBerry - does away with banner ads and gives you buttons that record and rewind programs.
"Car mode" on TuneIn puts just a few big buttons on the screen for easy navigation among favorite, recent, or recommended stations.
Nation-specific apps for iPhone by developer George Blu have names such as iRadio FR (for France) and iRadio Italia.
On a free version of iRadio UK, choose stations from a map of the United Kingdom, by city or by genre. The genre "speech" is UK-speak for talk radio, on which, for example, an early-morning London host was arguing this week with an angry caller: "That's rubbish, isn't it? Rubbish!" Set a sleep timer in five-minute increments up to two hours.
The iRadio UK app includes a player for Shoutcast radio, a platform for do-it-yourself Internet radio stations that pretty much anybody can set up.
By upgrading to the 99-cent version, you lose the banner advertising and get an integrated voice recorder , as well as a radio recorder that stores to a Dropbox account. And the upgrade includes a "car mode" that offers a one-button operation and easy station-switching.
Comparable Android apps by aor.leadapps include UK Radio, Punjab Radio, and BBC Radio - which packages broadcasts from BBC in the United Kingdom along with BBC Radio Asia and BBC World.
Hourly News, by Urban Apps, is 99 cents for Apple devices. Each time you turn on the app, it begins playing the latest five-minute news summaries from a top-notch selection of sources - NPR, BBC, Canada's CBC, the Wall Street Journal, and others.
You can choose which of the newscasts you want to hear and, using a drag-and-drop list, change the order in which they will play.
Radio Cloud Lite is the free version of Giles Chanot's novelty Apple application that displays an international array of radio-station logos on the 3D surface that you turn this way and that with swipes of a finger. A station begins playing as its logo comes front-and-center on the screen.
There didn't seem to be much in the way of organization in the free version, so I downloaded the 99-cent, no-advertising upgrade. With that, you get access to a menu of genres and countries. The instructions are to "select" the ones you favor. But what you actually have to do is de-select everything on the list that you don't want.
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