I made some rough calculations based upon the typical bandwidth consumed by streaming internet stations that use MP3 to estimate that the 2 GB monthly cap would be good for 34 hours of stereo music, and the 200 GB limit would only let 200 minutes squeeze through. While 34 hours seems like quite a bit of listening on a mobile device, I could see how the hours could add up for someone using an iPhone to stream internet radio in a car during a long commute. Of course that wouldn’t account for any other data usage for activities like email, browsing and facebook.

Therefore I was surprised to read a recent interview with Pandora CFO Steve Cakebread in which he declared, “The impact of data caps for Pandora listeners is almost non-existent.” Speaking with the investment site Seeking Alpha, Cakebread explained the typical bitrate Pandora uses is 32 kilobits per second, which is one-quarter the 128kbps rate I used for my estimate.

Bitrate and fidelity are tied together, with higher bitrates typically meaning better quality sound. MP3 is a nearly 20 year-old codec, and 128kbps is generally considered the bare minimum bitrate for obtaining acceptable stereo sound for music. However, Cakebread explains that Pandora utilizes the much more modern AAC+ codec which is more efficient and delivers better fidelity at lower bitrates than MP3. He tells Seeking Alpha that the average Pandora user listens to 10 hours a month, which adds up to 140 MB. This means that even if an average user did all her listening on a mobile device using the cell network, she would come in way under her 2 GB cap.

It’s good to have this kind of data directly from a major internet broadcaster like Pandora because it does help us understand the actual constraints faced by mobile streaming. At 32 kpbs a mobile listener with a 2 GB data plan should be good for some 142 hours of Pandora a month, which would be like listening for 17 whole work days. I can definitely imagine there are folks who listen to that much terrestrial radio, and I don’t doubt there are some power subscribers who tune in to Pandora for that much. So it does also illustrate the gap between mobile internet radio and its wired broadband and terrestrial broadcast counterparts. While mobile listening may not be seriously curtailed by data caps, it is still limited in ways that wired broadband or wireless broadcast are not.

2010 saw car audio systems making the leap into internet radio with smartphone connectivity and integration with services like Pandora. Last year’s CES moved a few steps forward on that track, with more manufacturers and radio apps joining the fray.

This year’s big radio announcement came from Ford which added much broader device and apps upport to its Sync AppLink system. Now a Ford vehicle with Sync will work with Apple iOS, Android and Blackberry devices and apps like iHeartRadio, Slacker Radio, NPR News and Tune In Radio, allowing drivers to control the app through the car’s interface, patching the audio into the vehicle’s sound system.

GM also finally debuted its own smartphone sync systems called MyLink in Chevys and CUE in Cadillacs. AM/FM radio is still standard, but CD players are optional, causing some commentators to declare this is yet another indicator of the inevitable death of the compact disc (a topic I will take up at a later date). Subara announced that it would be offering Harman’s Aha Radio platform in some 2013 vehicles.

Slacker radio announced a new Verizon 4G optimized app for Android tablets as well as new content deals. Slacker, which provides free and subscription channels of music and news content via smartphone apps, internet radios and the web, will offer ESPN Audio, which includes live streaming ESPN Radio coverage of games. The company also announced a deal with American Public Media to provide free access to programs like Marketplace, as well as music from Minneapolis AAA station The Current. Finally, Slacker will be adding content from the Weather Channel, featuring local and national forecasts.

In terms of actual radios, the French electronics company Archos had the most exciting product on display with its “>Archos 35 Home Connect clock radio. The device runs the Android operating system and features a touch screen to navigate internet radio, weather reports and other apps. Blackberry announced that its 7.1 OS release will activate the FM radio chip inside its BlackBerry Curve 9360 and 9380 smartphones.

The bright side of CES 2012 is that radio was no more lackluster than any other sector. In fact, one might argue that the radio announcements were some of the highlights.

It only makes sense, really, that a medium often referred to as the aether should now be associated with the cloud. For those who haven’t been paying attention to the interwebs for the last couple of years, the cloud refers to idea of data being available on nearly ubiquitous servers, anywhere on the internet. Gmail is email in the cloud, and in 2011 online music truly moved into the cloud, too.

Of course, easily accessible online music has been with us since the early 2000s. Apple’s iTunes Music Store first opened in 2008, and the Rhapsody subscription service has been with us since 2001. But it took until 2011 for the idea of an always available music service to hit critical mass.

The European service Spotify made its eagerly anticipated US debut in July of this year, providing access to an enormous catalog of music, featuring all the major labels, from a PC or mobile device. Spotify offers a free version of its app-based player for computers, while a paid subscription is required for mobile access. Then in October another European-based service, Rdio, answered Spotify’s challenge by offering its own limited free service that provides immediate access to specific songs, albums an artists in the browser.

While the likes of Spotfiy and Rdio attempt to offer the equivalent of a global jukebox, the major internet powerhouses Google, Amazon and Apple jumped in to offer their own cloud music services intended to let you access your own tunes anywhere there’s ‘net access. Amazon fired the first shot in March with the introduction of its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player platforms. When you subscribe to the service Amazon lets you upload an unlimited amount of music files that you can then play back on any computer or mobile device with an internet connection. Additionally, any music files you buy from Amazon can be automatically added to your Cloud Drive.

In May Google jumped into the fray with the public beta of its Google Music service. Like Amazon’s Cloud Player, Google lets you upload music files to its servers for playback anywhere. Google Music is free, but limits you uploading a mere 20,000 songs. The service went out of beta and became available to all in November. At the same time Google introduced its own music store, which also makes your purchased music available in the cloud.

Apple’s iCloud service opened for business when it released its newest iPhone in June. Like Google’s and Amazon’s services, iCloud lets you store the music you purchase in Apple’s iTunes music store. But Apple’s adds a unique twist to how it stores the music you already own. Instead of uploading your music files, iCloud scans your iTunes library and then provides you with a copy of any track that’s available in the iTunes music store. If you have an old, poorly encoded or low bitrate MP3 file you end up with a higher-quality iTunes music store version, which is a nice bonus. Then the only files you have to upload are ones that aren’t available in the iTunes store. Apple lets you store up to 25,000 of these songs, in addition to whatever new music you buy from their store.

Finally, I would be chastened if I did not mention Matthew’s favorite service, turntable.fm, which went public in May. As Matthew notes, turntable.fm is an interactive service built on a much more social experience than just listening to music by yourself. Instead of seeding a playlist or selecting tracks outright, turntable.fm lets you play DJ for virtual rooms full of listeners. Or you can be one of those listeners and let other online DJs take over. Either way, all of the music is delivered from the cloud.

What I find amazing is that, aside from Apple’s iCloud, a free version of all these services is available, provided you’re willing to put up with certain limitations on storage or mobile device access. I’ve been using all four of the free services this year, and find each of them useful for different reasons.

As I mentioned in my reviews of Spotify and Rdio, while each service’s catalog is impressively large, for my tastes there are a sufficient quantity of omissions to keep me from ponying up for their paid plans. I have uploaded some music to both Google and Amazon, though nothing close to my whole collection (which, admittedly, runs into hundreds of gigabytes). While both companies offer a desktop app that will upload your music in the background, it’s still a slow process. However, it is nice to make a portion of my collection available for anywhere listening, especially using a browser-based player that works on almost any computer.

Admittedly, in many ways I’m nitpicking with my criticisms of all these services. Ten years ago it was a pipe dream that we could access so much music, whether from our own collection or from an enormous online library, from just about anywhere in reach of a wi-fi or cell signal. Even if such a service existed, the cost would have been much greater, and certainly not free.

At the same time, these services face real limits not of their own making in the mobile space. The days of inexpensive unlimited mobile bandwidth are over, with the top three carriers all setting limits of about 2 GB per month for their basic data plans. At the common music data rate of 128 kbps, this works out to about 34 hours of listening in a month. The premium services and Apple’s iCloud offer higher quality files that use more bandwidth, reducing the listening time to more like 17 hours a month.

If you do most of your listening on a wi-fi connection, like I do, then this limitation isn’t much of a concern. But for folks looking to listen while in their cars or otherwise on the go where there isn’t wi-fi, these limits have more impact. Someone with a hour of commuting a day will probably make it through a month of listening, but much more will require upping the data plan.

Nevertheless, when you add in the services that debuted in 2011 to those already available, like Pandora, Rhapsody and last.fm, there’s an amazing array of customizable music available to play over the internet. While we may not yet be at the point where there’s global jukebox containing every recorded song and album, there’s an awful lot to choose from. The question for 2012 is if mobile bandwidth can keep up with the demand to listen to all this music anytime, anywhere.

Clear Channel may have been too focused on scarfing up stations in the early 2000s to construct anything resembling an internet strategy, but the company has been making up for lost time with its iHeartRadio service. When it went live in 2008 it was primarily a site and mobile app to provide access to the live streams of Clear Channel stations. Since then iHeartRadio has morphed into a competitor to the likes of Pandora and last.fm, especially with the addition of custom stations in September which provide Pandora-like experience of music based upon a seed song.

Back in September Clear Channel promised that the stations would be commercial free through the end of the year. This week the company announced that they will stay commercial-free through April 1, 2012.

This is obviously a move intended to lure Pandora and last.fm listeners who want to avoid the free services’ commercials, in addition to hooking users already using iHeartRadio to catch terrestrial stations. However, when a Pandora user jumps ship she also loses the stations she has created and all the curating she’s invested by giving tracks the thumbs-up or thumbs-down. That user investment is one of the things that keeps Pandora users loyal, though a new user to iHeartRadio can make the same investment in Clear Channel’s platform.

Working in Clear Channel’s favor is that if a listener tires of her custom stations she can easily navigate to a broadcast station–that will have plenty of commercials–or one of iHeartRadio’s curated or themed stations, like CBGB Radio or Eagles Radio.

I must admit to being a strong critic of Clear Channel and the destruction it wreaked on the radio industry through its consolidation strategy that hemorrhaged staff and homogenized programming across the country. So there definitely is a part of me that wants to find fault with iHeartRadio, on principle, if nothing else.

But after spending the better part of the week listening to the service I must be honest and give it due credit. It’s kind of a jack-of-all-trades for internet radio listening. It offers a lot of options, even if none of them are class leading. But, as I’ll explain, the sound quality of iHeartRadio is probably its weakest attribute.

The customized stations work like last.fm or Pandora. Feed it a song seed and iHeartRadio starts serving up similar artists and songs. One aspect I like is the “Station Control” feature which lets you decide whether you’re interested in hearing more familiar artists or “more discovery” which plays artists you are less likely to have heard before. When I first tried the custom station feature I wondered if I would be limited to artists actually played on Clear Channel stations. So I entered the 1980 Swiss experimental metal band Celtic Frost as a test. And quite dutifully iHeartRadio created a station full of extreme and harsh sounds that are rarely found on commercial radio.

However, the custom stations are more limited than Pandora’s because you can specify only the initial seed. By comparison Pandora lets you finely tune a station by adding additional artists and songs as seeds. So if you like the 70s power pop of Cheap Trick, you can further refine it by adding in the more ragged punk edge of the Replacements, for instance.

iHeartRadio’s curated channels remind me most of satellite radio, organized around a genre, such as hair metal, the music of a particular artist, or songs ostensibly chosen by an artist, like Radio Weezer. Of course the terrestrial stations on iHeartRadio are just that. I’m not sure how much the rock station in Waco, TX will differ from WZZO in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. But if it matters to you, then you have the choice.

Fidelity is what I find to be iHeartRadio’s greatest limitation. I’ve listened to the service on my iPhone, iPad and two different Mac laptops. At home I’ve used both my MacBook Pro’s built-in headphone jack and two different USB audio devices. Across all devices I found that the custom stations sound the best. While quality does vary some from song to song, overall fidelity is roughly equivalent to Pandora’s free service. In general that’s equivalent to a 128 kbps MP3 file, which is considered the minimum for decent sound.

By comparison, the custom stations all exhibited perceptibly lower quality sound that would indicate a lower bitrate is used. No matter the station I chose the high end exhibited the shimmery quality of a poorly encoded MP3. There’s an overall graininess to the sound that I find fatiguing when listening on headphones for more than 10 or 20 minutes. These deficiencies are quite audible over speakers, too, though less bothersome at low volumes.

The broadcast stations are all over the map, in terms of fidelity. While some approach the smoother quality of the custom stations, most had a compromised and grainy sound like the curated stations. However, I found most of the broadcast rock stations to be even more fatiguing than the curated stations due to the heavy compression and processing evident in these streams. Most mainstream commercial stations use compression and other sound processing to make their stations sound louder and stand out when a listener is scanning the dial. This comes at the expense of dynamics, as the volume of the sound varies very little, with much less change than you’d hear when listening to the original recording.

Listening to most broadcast stations on iHeartRadio with headphones was tiring after 10 minutes or less. In all cases my local analog and HDRadio broadcast signals sounded much better than their internet stream counterparts. In particular the treble was overly pronounced and distorted on the internet streams, while the broadcast signals sounded smoother and more natural to my ear.

I recognize that I’m probably more sensitive to sound quality than many listeners, however I’d frankly rather listen to a decent AM signal than have to hear many iHeartRadio stations over headphones for more than a half-hour. Using cheap computer speakers at low volume the fidelity limitations are less perceptible, and I’m certain that’s how many folks experience internet radio. But I think the sonic flaws of even the curated and genre stations are obvious enough for an average listener to recognize, especially if she compares it to the custom stations or a broadcast signal.

That said, I can see the appeal of having all of these options in one app. I’m not sure it’s enough to keep me from using Pandora, Spotify and other services. The field is getting pretty crowded, and while each service offers something unique, none of them is sufficient to take over the majority of my online listening time. I may be a freak that way, with tastes that run decidedly outside the mainstream. Then again, isn’t the promise of the internet supposed to be infinite choice?

I’m curious to know what Radio Survivor readers think about iHeartRadio and other internet radio services. Let us know in the comments.

My Imagining Silicon Valley box

I grew up in Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of “Silicon Valley,” and my entire life has been shaped by the ever-advancing technologies being invented in my childhood backyard. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the death of Steve Jobs yesterday has hit me in ways that I wouldn’t expect.

It was a source of pride for many of us that the founders of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were locals who grew up in the same surroundings that we did (they both went to my junior high and high school). Parents of elementary school friends worked at Apple in the 1970s and I first got my hands on an early Apple computer in 1978 or 1979 when I took my first computer programming class in elementary school. Probably using the BASIC programming language, we learned how to translate code into graphics that ended up looking like a boxy needlepoint display of letters on the computer screen. But it was magic.

The first computer that I bought was an Apple and my first smartphone was an iPhone. Although I’ve eschewed online music, I can’t ignore the fact that iTunes changed everything for the music and radio industry. Before its launch I worked at a start-up that tried to figure out how to use online playlists for music discovery; but it wasn’t until iTunes that the masses truly understood digital music’s potential.

Oddly enough I heard about Steve Job’s death over the radio. I’d been glued to the TV and radio all day yesterday, following the manhunt for the disgruntled worker who shot 10 people in Cupertino. My family still lives in the house on the Cupertino/Sunnyvale border where I grew up and the gun-toting mass murderer was on the loose very nearby. As I listened to KCSB for the latest word on his whereabouts, I was shocked when the radio announcer casually stated the news that Steve Jobs had died. I wasn’t expecting it and it seemed even more surreal since Cupertino was the focus of so much news attention that day already. It’s only natural that both events would lead me to reflect back on a childhood in the suburbs.

By the time that I was a teenager, I thought that Sunnyvale was boring. I was drawn to the East Coast for college, in large part because I felt that there was more history there. But after college I became fiercely protective about Sunnyvale (and Santa Clara Valley)’s hidden history. All of my life, remnants of the past (orchards, farm houses, feed stores, lumber yards, etc.) and signs of the area’s history were being torn down and replaced by modern structures and office parks.

Places like Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Atari were lauded as tangible examples of the Silicon Valley brain trust. Yet, I also thought it was important to remember the ghosts of Santa Clara Valley, from the one lurking in the Toys ‘R Us of my youth, to Sarah Winchester (of Winchester Mystery House fame), to a long-gone train store in my neighborhood. For a graduate school project I wrote a paper, built my first web page, and created a shoe box full of memorabilia all around the idea of “imagining my suburbia and searching for ghosts.” As I pulled out that shoe box today, not only did I find my college application essay and a printout about the demographics of Cupertino, but I also found a scrap of paper that said “Jobs & Wozniak” and another that read “work hard = success.”

Everyone has hometown heroes and Jobs was certainly the most famous of those heroes to emerge from the community where I was raised. But I don’t think it was until the last decade that the true impact of Steve Jobs was felt. iPods, iTunes, iPhones, and the iPad helped to elevate Apple to a whole new level as they continued to innovate products that touched even more aspects of the daily lives of people everywhere.

Paul has already pointed out some connections between Apple and radio and I’d have to agree that iTunes and the iPod have presented challenges to the radio industry. But at the same time, iTunes and the iPhone have also facilitated both the discovery of terrestrial radio stations and have allowed for new ways to listen in. Some have likened the iPhone to a modern day transistor radio, since it can be held in one’s hand and can stream radio stations.

As I continue to process the news of Jobs’ death, I also realize that his “local” status has always been a big deal for me. In Silicon Valley, many people are transplants, having migrated here in order to chase their dreams. As a local gal, it’s somehow reassuring and comforting that someone who shared similar experiences as a kid was able to have such a huge impact on the world. I’m just sorry that he didn’t have the time to realize even more of his dreams.

The iHeartRadio Doris Day channel

I’m listening to Clear Channel’s new updated version of iHeartRadio, which allows you to create Pandora-like music channels. iHeart is pretty easy to access via your Facebook account. And if you overlook the annoyance that it requires you to ‘like’ it to get started, it’s a limited but reasonable application.

Once you’re logged in, you can create your own channels by picking artists, genres, or bands. I picked Doris Day (yes; I’m a Doris Day song fan). And the system kicked in with Day doing her great version of “My Secret Love.”

Excellent choice. Alas—I was hoping for a few more Doris Day tunes. Instead I next got Dean Martin crooning “Ain’t that a kick in the head,” followed by Andy Williams singing “Moon River.”

I like the Martin song. As for Williams, that was an actual kick in the head, as far as I was concerned. To add insult to injury, the Clear Channel database followed that with Bing Crosby warbling “I’ll be home for Christmas.” That was it for me. I went back to the home page to try again.

Next I tried the app’s new classical channel. I got a performance of Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances for violin and piano, which was a great opening choice. I should note that iHeart’s sound is truly excellent. Really fine tone for everything I listened to. And the classical channel was commercial free (let’s see how long that lasts). The Bartok was followed by Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. Another fine pick.

But I really wanted to hear another Doris Day piece, so I went back to that channel. A good selection came up: June Christy singing “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” followed by an Eartha Kitt tune: “Ushaka Dara—A Old Turkish Tale.” But no Doris.

Anyway, your iHeartRadio channels come with three parameters: “Familiar artists,” “More discovery,” or a combination of the two. You can make Facebook comments about the songs; like them; dislike them; do all the various things that Pandora lets you do. There are a variety of preset channels: 80s & 90s; Classic Rock; Reggae; no big shockers here.

Will the new iHeart take off? The critics will doubtless cry too little, too late. But it isn’t a bad app. Comes in iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7, and Blackberry.

I’m wrapping up this review and still listening. In comes another Dean Martin tune: “Catch a falling star.” Nice, but couldn’t we get Day doing “Que Sera Sera”?

Nope. Instead it’s Rosemary Clooney singing “This ‘Ol House.” Ok. I’m outta here.

As so:

The image to the left is a representation of the Kool and the Gang tune “Fresh”:

“As you might expect from a classic disco song, Kool & the Gang‘s hit ‘Fresh’ doesn’t have much rhythm variety going on: the red rhythm petal is quite slim,” Last.fm’s Mathias Mauch explains in a blog post.

“This is not to say they don’t groove, it’s just the rhythm pattern does not change much over the course of the piece. There is some melodic and harmonic variety going on on small time scales—the green harmony petal is quite thick close to the origin. Towards the tip the green petal goes very thin though, which indicates that the general tonality does not change much over the whole piece—no cheesy key changes there.”

If you are registered with Last.fm, you can even vote on the relative variety of selected songs, then see how Last.fm visually measures that diversity. To the right below is an image for Motorhead‘s song “Overkill.”

The translucent portions of the image represent a mean average. “When this is bigger it usually means there are very significant, but rare changes going on,” the instructions disclose.

Why are Last.fm’s users being given the ballot in this instance?

“We think this visualisation could be used by other people who’d like to find out about the complexity of music, and that’s why we want to publish the technique at an international scientific conference later this year,” Mauch says.

“But here’s the problem: although we’re quite happy with our signal processing magic (which automatically guesses the amount of structural change going on in the music), we don’t know yet if human beings like yourself feel the same way as the computers… and we need to know that in order to convince the scientists to publish our results.”

“Slacker Premium Radio enables listeners to search, play and replay specific songs and entire albums from the Slacker library, which features over 8 million songs, as well as provides easy access to top songs and artists from each of the 150+ expert-programmed Slacker genre stations,” the announcement explains. “Listeners also have the ability to create specific playlists both on mobile and on the web, and even experience off-line playback through the ability to cache stations, playlists and entire albums.”

The $9.99 per month service is available for the iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry via T-Mobile, AT&T, or Verizon.

Functionalities include:

• Search, play and replay specific songs or entire albums
• Create specific playlists on mobile and on the web
• Off-line playback of stations, playlists and albums on the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch, Android and BlackBerry smartphones
• Replay specific songs on programmed and custom stations
• Browse and play “Favorite” songs, now collected in one location
• Unlimited song skipping
• Ad-free listening
• Complete song lyrics
• Browse Top Charts on all Slacker genre stations
• “Peek Ahead” artist, album and song preview
• Ability to skip forward and backward

Here are some YouTube instructional videos.

I am a monthly donor to my local public radio station so that I don’t even have call in during its pledge drives — they’ve already got my donation. So despite their attempts to make the morning drive pledge pitches compelling, by the second or third day I turn the station off in the morning because I’m sick of pledge drive. I know it’s a necessary evil, and I’ve been just as responsible working in community and college radio. So I do empathize with the listeners who pledged early to the stations I’ve worked at, too. Nevertheless, when I’m just the listener who has already donated, I just want to go back to regular programming.

San Francisco’s KQED has come up with a remedy for its early donors — a pledge-drive free webstream. This feed is only for folks who have ponied up $45 or more, and it is only online. While the station had been toying with the idea for a while, it is only with the growing popularity of mobile devices that can stream online radio that it seemed feasible.

I think KQED is smart to publicize this option well in advance of the actual drive, which begins May 5. This way they’re giving a lot of incentive for would-be donors to get their pledges in early. They’re also garnering a fair degree of publicity for their drive, which otherwise wouldn’t be newsworthy at all. Getting in a significant number of pledges in advance of the start date may also help the station reach its goal faster, cutting the drive short.

However, like all good marketing techniques, it will be interesting to see if this one has legs, and if other stations also take up the mantle. Putting up a pledge-free stream does require producing a whole other stream of programming, which may be too expensive and complex for smaller stations. And as the idea loses its novelty the incentive may wear off for many listeners who will go back to needing to be reminded dozens of times on air before they finally make their pledge.

The station also potentially risks losing multiple donations from a single donor who is moved a second or third time by a new pitch or special premium gift. I don’t imagine that these donors who give multiple times make up more than a small percentage of overall donors. But having worked and coordinated many pledge drives in the last fourteen years, I do know that these donors do exist and their overall contributions really do add up.

I predict that KQED’s pledge-free stream experiment will be successful in helping the station hit or break its goal ahead of schedule. The novelty and publicity will help see to that. Then I expect that other public stations in larger markets with the resources to pull of a second live stream of programming will jump in and see some gains, too. But I’m not entirely sure that we’ll see the idea still going four years from now. Or, we may see the idea get diluted, with the pledge-free stream turning into the fewer-pledge-breaks stream.

I am very interested to see how this plays out.

The Canadian government’s communications technology lab has released a new Android application: FM TwoO (pronounced: two “O,” as in Web 2.0). FM TwoO accesses’ the embedded FM receiver in the Samsung Galaxy S class series.

“FM TwoO can be tuned to any station manually or by seeking through usual FM frequency bands,” the Communications Research Centre of Canada’s announcement says. The standard data in the FM-RDS [Radio Data System] protocol shows up on the main screen of the app when the radio goes into playing mode.

Plus the CRCC has thrown out a whole new Android library so developers can built their own apps for the Galaxy Series.

The library can be used to create new applications that make use of the FM-RDS features or to add this capability to an existing application. In the first released version, the library provides live access to PI, PS and Radio Text content. The CRC hopes to make this technology available to all mobile phone platforms.

The National Association of Broadcasters Radio Tech Check newsletter adds the following commentary on this release.

The popular Samsung Galaxy S class of Android smart phones is an example of a cell phone device which includes, but does not make use of, an “FM chip” that would allow for FM radio reception. An impressive list of features for these phones does not include FM radio, however the FM chip is there, unutilized.

What I’d be interested in knowing is why Samsung popped this capability into the device but never used it. Anyway, thanks to the CRCC for making the Samsung series more useful to FM radio lovers.