Public Radio and Public Radio Tuner for iPhone

I have a funny listening relationship with the radio. When I commuted, of course, I listened to the radio all the time. I had a subscription to XM Radio's service for a few years, even though my drive was little more than 30 minutes one-way. (Not bad for Southern California.)

But I don't really commute anymore, or drive as much as I used to. When I am in the car, though, I find myself usually tuning to KKJZ out of Cal State University Long Beach, arguably the best jazz and blues station in the country. It's a public station, depending on listeners' financial contributions to survive. I've given a few hundred bucks over the years--enough to assuage my guilt, but just barely.

[ Stay ahead of advances in mobile technology with InfoWorld's Mobile Edge blog and Mobilize newsletter. ]

Well, with Internet radio supplanting my "terrestrial" listening, I might have to send another $50 to help offset their bandwidth costs. Public radio fans, it turns out, have a couple of sound options for listening to their favorite stations on their iPhones or iPods. We've covered a few public radio apps for the iPhone in the past; here are two more for your consideration.

Intersect World's Public Radio app is a simple radio stream aggregator. It lets you browse public radio stations alphabetically by call letters and grouped by state. The $2 app also keeps track of your listening history and lets you bookmark favorites, a standard feature among several Internet radio applications.

Station selection, while extensive, is not necessarily exhaustive. The app lists all public radio stations broadcasting online in MP3. But the developers cover their bases by letting users add their own streams. For example, I added my alma mater's student-run station, KSDT, to my streams in a matter of minutes. (It's funny--I've listened to that station more in the past 10 months on the Internet than I listened in just over four years as a student at UC San Diego in the early 1990s.)

The app boasts some nice social networking features, as well. You can share your stations via Twitter and Facebook, and by e-mail of course. You can also visit stations' Web sites from the app, but be advised that will cut off your stream.

The most recent update of Public Radio, optimized for software update 3.0, seems to have killed some bugs. The app hasn't crashed on me as it did several times previously.

The developers should consider emulating Public Radio Exchange's free Public Radio Tuner app, which lets users search by programming category as well as city or station call letters. Intersect World's app inexplicably lacks a formal search feature. With more than 320 public radio stations on offer, I cannot be the only one who would find it helpful to filter my browsing by jazz, classical or alternative music stations. I'm sure others wouldn't mind perusing news and talk stations as well.