Lately, one of the things I’ve really been getting into is NPR. It has now become part of my daily routine to wake up and tune into to WNYC for “Morning Edition,” and catch “All Things Considered” when I get home from school. But, I’m not always at a computer or near a radio when my favorite shows are on. So, when I got my iPhone, I thought it would allow me to get my radio fix anywhere I was. Not so true.
There are two major flaws in the iPhone which it keep it from playing radio. The first is the lack of certain iPod accessory compatibility. There are several iPod radio tuner add-ons, including Apple’s own (pictured at right). None of them work with the iPhone, which is not surprising as it could interfere with the iPhone’s WiFi and cellular radios. Yet still, the iPhone would be able to get Internet radio streams, right? Wrong. Audio stream file types, such as .pls and .m3u, will not play on the iPhone, even though standard audio files (MP3, AAC, etc. — really anything that will play in iTunes) linked to in web pages will work.
This flaw is a large yet still unchecked problem in the iPhone, and really should be fixed. I mean, it’s one of the many really simple software problems that could be solved with a little free update — all Apple needs to do is enable basic .m3u and .pls streaming in the iPhone’s iTunes. If Apple could just do that, iPhone users around the country — and soon to be around the world — may be just a little happier.
I would prefer the FM Tuner, since I attend many events where the program broadcasts over an FM feed for the Hard-of-Hearing. I currently use an "iriver H10" that also allows me to record that same FM signal.
"Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" are both available via the iTunes store (gratis). Try a search there for NPR and you can subscribe to them as podcasts. Not live, but better than nothing.
I agree. I was disappointed to find out from Pogue's review that it won't stream internet radio. Too bad. I thought it be really cool to use it on a long distance road trips to stream audio instead of the regular radio. Some stations play music that just isn't played on regular radio. Its also a great way to find out new music.
QTstreaming would be real nice too
How tough would it be to just load the codecs for the streaming media -- and for that matter, any other media type that is not currently supported by the iPhone but is supported by QT on the Mac -- into the QuickTime folder on the iPhone? Would the codecs have to be recompiled for the CPU on the iPhone?
Oh I so agree with you. I purchased the radio ipod radio add-on with the hope that it might work. Alas I was wrong. So I do definitely hope for a solution of some kind. I will be keeping my fingers crossed.
True, but I believe you can at least get free podcasts of "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" on a daily basis.
I'm an NPR fan from way back and I rarely listen to an NPR station live anymore. I get podcasts of my favorite shows and have more than I could possibly listen to. (Though I rarely listen live, I still financially support my local public radio stations.) If podcasts aren't available for your favorite shows, you can record the audio stream on your Mac (with the spectacular Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba, for example) and listen later on an iPod or iPhone. So while it would be nice to have radio for the phone, it is possible to get your NPR fix without it.
Limitations on the iPhone are in part related to delivering a reliable, stable platform and in part due to it's marketing and licensing, not any technology limitation.
Given that Apple has sealed the deal with Google (and AT&T) to stream YouTube, it's not that the iPhone needs a "simple update," it's that the corporations (including Apple and Steve Jobs) are taking their own sweet time to shake hands on a deal.
Consider the hand Steve Jobs has dealt himself -- should he go cap in hand to the candidate partners today and offer them the "prospect and promise" of ten million of iPhone users by years' end?
I think he plans to work through a few months of market development with "drum beat" marketing and be able to draw credible statistics and projections -- especially given the sound basis of the iPod and Apple overall when it comes to market growth potential -- and be able to deal himself the next winning hand in terms of revenue share and profit margin.
Steve Jobs is a pretty generous business leader (compared to almost any other low-end billionaire technocrat) and I think he knows that to be generous today by rushing thin deals to market would be to milk the calf and risk the whole farm. You're only as good as your last success.
Instead, I think Jobs knows that he has to sacrifice the wrong product at the wrong time (such as the Newton.) Does the Newton hold a candle to the iPhone? No. Does the iPhone even begin to tap the genius, innovation and potenital of the Newton? It has yet to begin. Short of the sound of deleting something with the crumple of paper, the iPhone has limitless opportunity to bring the genius of the Newton interface and its approach to workflow. The Palm was the Newton killer. The Newton will be the Palm killer. No PDA user will stay with their thumb-keyboard or their Grafitti stylus once the iPhone delivers even its first generation of PDA software. Imagine being able to "shake" an iPhone (like an Etch-a-sketch) to "delete" or imagine combining voice-recognition (the iPhone has ample CPU grunt to process real-time voice recognition) at the same time as using gestures (from the Newton.)
Look at how the iPhone is a clean sheet of paper.
Imagine how the power of the user multiples once Apple combines the innovative human-machine interaction with the verstaility of a hand-held device that understands movement, gestures and potentially even facial expression recognition. Soon enough the iPhone will know where it is and be able to act as the agent for its user with far greater versatility, security and convenience than numerous single-point devices.
Consider a typical day, waking up to the alarm of the iPhone and confirming the request to begin a paused broadcast of the news from satellite radio, automatically confirming your golf reservation or changing a conflicting appointment, the iPhone controls the home-automation to start the coffe or tea maker, it confirms there was no intruder or it shows an image of the face of the visitor to the door. You drop the iPhone into a pocket and it pairs with your wrist-watch to send data such as email headers or weather or caller-id to the watch. The iPhone functions as a proximity security pass to your house and your car. No need for separate keys. It can be a handheld remote to any device. You might decide to continue listening to the satellite news (from a time-shifted buffer) or skip ahead based on preferred topics or a Google-driven weighted connection between email or task content with news. As you drive out, the movement of the iPhone controls the garden sprinklers to pause as you drive by (it's earlier than usual and the sprinklers operate based on weather, climate and best use of irrigation) then the security system knows how best to handle the needs of people still at home or accommodate the limited needs of unusual visit from a plumbing service company (each of whom have their iPhone, representing their changing schedules and their various levels of access to space or data.)
And so on.
Almost limitless.
From a teenager sharing day to day life with other teenagers to a technophobe protecting frorm opening the wrong bottle of medication and in immediate, personal contact with their doctor by voice or video, an iPhone can become the very first real "robot" in the many ways first conceived almost a century ago. As a wililng, tireless servant. As a protector and even as a companion.
We'll see.
There is good news all around for you, both of your problems are solved in the iPhone already, just not quite in the way you are expecting.
FM Radio has been replaced by Podcasts, which your iPhone can access either live or by subscription. There is no need for analog radio to get NPR into your iPhone. Analog radio gear will also interfere with the three antennae you're already carrying.
NPR Podcast Directory
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php
You can open the above page on your iPhone, choose a show, and click on any "POD" link and the Podcast will display immediately on your iPhone, right off the server.
Here is All Things Considered:
NPR: All Things Considered
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=4819413
Click on POD on your iPhone to see a list of all episodes, then click an episode, then click the QuickTime play button to listen and the item opens in QuickTime. Notice you can fast forward or move the playhead beyond what you have downloaded. Even over the cell network NPR will play live.
Alternatively, you can put the same "POD" URL into iTunes to subscribe to the Podcast and iTunes puts the latest one into the iPod part of your iPhone when you sync it, same as an iPod.
> .pls and .m3u,
Again, replaced by Podcasts. These are all just text files that describe a list of media files by name. However using RSS with MP3/MP4 enclosures (Podcast) will get you 100,000x the world wide compatibility, much richer meta data, and enables people to subscribe as well as listen live. Wherever you find these files it is likely there is also a Podcast, which is just an updated Web-compatible iPod-compatible M3U for the 21st century.
> streaming
The iPhone not doing streaming is a feature. Instead of reading specially prepared media files off a special streaming server, it reads standard MP3/MP4 files off a standard Web server using a very cool method where it only asks the server for the parts of the file it needs. So you can start viewing a 1 hour movie and right away you can move the play head to 45:00 and it works.
This is sort of Web 2.0 media streaming. It's how the Web wants to host media (plain MP3/MP4 on a plain Web server) because you may ask users to upload content and it doesn't have to be converted to run on the streaming server. The iPhone's method means the iPhone has to work harder but a ton of work disappears from content preparation. All you have to do is make MP3/MP4 out of whatever authoring environment (even iTunes) and copy those files to a Web server and then link to them with RSS and HTML and they play everywhere.
> MP3, AAC, etc. - really anything that will play in iTunes
This should read "anything that will play on an iPod" because iTunes will play anything that QuickTime will play, which is about 200 more types than an iPod/iPhone, which supports just MP3 and MP4 (H.264/AAC) or raw audio.
With the iPhone it is clear Apple is thinking of today and tomorrow but not yesterday. While it might seem like a drag to lose FM and M3U and RTSP all of that functionality is in the iPhone via Web 2.0, plain MP3/MP4 on an Apache server with either an RSS or HTML index.
I just want that remote control that the iPod radio tuner has, so I can use my iPhone in the car stereo. (I connect my nano's headphone jack into the RCA inputs of my aux input on the stereo) Right now I'm risking an accident if I were to try to get any music playing while driving, or skip to the next track. Hopefully something soon will appear as a solution.
OK, this post has gotten a lot of comments, so I need to clarify some things. Firstly, I do acknowledge that NPR offers podcasts of many of its shows, some of which I listen to (mainly "NPR: Story of the Day" and "This American Life"). But the problem with podcasts is that for news shows like "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," they need to be listened to live, or they fall out of date. Also, I have not even been able to find podcasts for those two shows at all. The link commented by Fred was for "All Songs Considered," so if anyone can find "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" podcasts, I'd be happy to listen to them.
One thing I was really hoping for when I got my iPhone was the ability to use Pandora on it. Now, with no flash / shockwave, that ain't gonna happen. :(
I love Pandora.com.... sniff... sniff... C'Mon Apple!
Maybe there is still hope...
See this about some hidden referrences inside the iPhone's firmware, including: "com.apple.mobile.radio"
Check it out here:
http://www.iphonealley.com/forums/showthread.php?t=541
None of them work? Really? Maybe my iPhone is special then because I've been using my Griffin iFM with my iPhone since the day I brought the phone home. In fact, I'm using it now. There's a little interference if I don't put it in Airplane mode but it still works ok even if I don't.
Fred H,
Thank you so much for that info - the link works fantastically! Now, wouldn't it be great if "radio" worked like YouTube and Google Maps so that you could put in urls such as the ones you mentioned and/or do the real streaming thing. I know it's coming!
I'm surprised by this post. Mr. Freedman really should invest some time into trying out podcasts.
I've got a podcast playlist that goes on in my morning commute that includes Bloomberg analyst calls, NY Times and NPR news summary, and a couple of other things.
Afternoon it's NPR marketplace, All things Considered, and a few more.
Power of information in my hands. What I want, when I want it. You should try it.
PS: if you are still glued to live TV and channel surfing, you might also want to give TiVO a try!
I went to the local mac shop today to have a go at the iphone and some music streaming. Well, as you all know by now, I had no luck. I was thinking about purchasing the iphone but with this feature lacking plus no java or flash, what is the use of the iphone? To only partially access sites and content? No thank you.
I went to the local mac shop today to have a go at the iphone and some music streaming. Well, as you all know by now, I had no luck. I was thinking about purchasing the iphone but with this feature lacking plus no java or flash, what is the use of the iphone? To only partially access sites and content? No thank you.