Dear Fellow Rodinhooders,
Like everyone else I am a great fan of bollywood music. I love new songs as well as old songs. I spend around 3 hours daily traveling to work. During this time I keep listening to local FM stations. Frankly speaking, I got bored with all that repeated songs, there are no variety as such and same song plays on all other stations.
Then I tried few available online radio apps, but I was not happy with any of the apps because of following reasons:
1. No proper categorization: everyone has got their own taste when it comes to music. Some like new songs, some would prefer old songs, few would like ghazals, and someone like me would like listening to all time favorite Vividh Bharati 🙂
Almost all apps I downloaded threw all stations in one big list, it becomes very hard to know what genre generally station plays.
2. Dead stations: Many stations refused to load and will never play. At some point it gets frustrated and you start believing that app is totally useless.
3. No song info: There is no information about the song currently being played. So if you liked a song and want to get more information, you are out of luck. (Generally speaking, getting songs info depends on the stations. Some station makes this available and some don’t. Even if this info is available, most radio apps chose to ignore it).
4. Huge list of radio stations: while it is good to have so many stations but why one would be interested in stations playing songs in a language your are not interested now? It is very difficult to search for radio stations for your country or stations playing the genre that you are interested in.
5. Ad, ad & more ads: Switch stations: ad. Search station: ad, Listen to x minute: ad.
Well after endless search of a perfect radio app, I ended up coding the one myself 🙂
I can’t say it is perfect but I tried to straighten out the issues I found in other apps.
Friends, presenting yet another bollywood/hindi music streaming radio app:
Radioo Bollywoood FM
Available on Android (mobile & tablets) & Windows 10 (desktop, phone, tablet) platforms.
My expectations were very simple:
1. No ads: yes, this app will never have any ads. That’s a promise.
2. Only include stations which works: No dead stations, if found one, will be removed.
3. Focused: Include only those stations playing Bollywood songs (exceptions being All India Radio, included regional AIR stations Vividh Bharti, FM Rainbow etc)
4. Proper categorization: Taking care about your music taste. Like old songs, go to Sadabahar Gaane tab, enjoy ghazals, switch to ghazals tab etc.
5. Song information: Displays information about the song being played even if app is playing in the background (song info depends on the station, some may not have this info).
6. Keep the UI simple: No background image of actors/actresses, no colorful fonts, no useless alignment, no bullshit.
7. Keep permissions limited: will never add any feature which require any permission other than the Internet Access.
Requesting you to please check out the app from Play Store & Windows 10 Store (search Radioo Bollywood FM). Not compatible with Windows 8.1 so searching there wont return anything.
Looking forward for your valuable feedback.
App Twitter Handle: @radioobollywood
App Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/onlineradioo/
Thank you, Cheers !!!
Suhel
@theskhan
Ajay Agrawal
Tried it on android.. Great app.. Will give more feedback after trying for a week..
Suhel Khan
Thanks Ajay for checking out the app 🙂
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
not clear how the business model works? How do u make money from this? Are the radio stations ok with this?
What happens to the ads inside their content?
Suhel Khan
Nice to see comment from TheRodinhood himself 🙂
Well, I am dedicating this app to the community, there is no plan to monetise nor will there be any.
I am techie by heart, use lots of open source & free tools for my day to day stuff as well as in my other side projects.
This is my small effort to give back to the community. Hope people will find this app useful.
I think radio stations should be ok with this as this app could help them get more listeners which in turn means more revenue for them.
I did some research and found that using their streaming url in other apps is generally acceptable as long as stream is not altered. But if any station wants to opt out they can do so.
I can not control any in-stream ads broadcasted by the stations. But I think lets be fair, if a station is paying license fees to deliver us the awesome songs, let them earn some money as well 🙂
Sridhar Rajendran
Hi Suhel,
I appreciate your efforts in coming up with this app but I would like to express my views which are quite contrary to what you have. I use Gaana(both desktop and mobile) almost everyday and never have I felt any of the problems you have mentioned. I am not sure what apps you tried so I am unable to comment on them. The top music streaming apps of today have a mammoth collection and allow a lot of customization like creating playlists and downloading songs.
As far as ads are concerned, I don’t mind them as I being offered a great service at no cost. And if it does bug me a lot, there is always a paid option to remove the ads. While it is a good thought to give back to the society, a business needs to make money to be sustainable 🙂