Radium 3 is available in the App Store for $9.99 until February 19th. I pop around from Spotify to iTunes but I also like Internet Radio from vTuner. But I use a browser to get at those. I listen to music all day every day. I never tried Radium out – and reading the recent reviews about it not working anymore I was hesitant. But I pulled the trigger.

Initially it wasn’t playing anything and there really isn’t a browse for it… you kind of need to know what to look for in advance. I can favorite stations, but I don’t see a Favorites list anywhere instantly viewable. So while it’s not perfect, it is streaming stuff for me. I like how it’s tucked away up in the menu bar.

We’ll see how this goes. I want to like it more than I do.

Update:
Now that I’ve used it for more than eight minutes, I have found things I missed before – notably what happens to the things I favorite. If you clear the search field, those items appear in the autocomplete list. Many stations take a while to initiate actual playback, but I don’t believe that is any fault of the application itself. I have a wide open pipe here, but sometimes latencies get introduced depending on the origination of the stream.

Update 2:
I added the update above before realizing that someone from the CatPig team actually (somehow) found this post about Radium 3 (Google filter perhaps?) and commented to me know about the Favorites list.

1. It’s very cool to have a comment from someone on the development team. A honor really. Much like the responsiveness from the people working on Wunderlist.
2. I personally might add a widget row below the text field and the autocomplete list – to allow for some more direct things. I don’t know if they have the capability in API to generate a full list broken down by location (eg. I might want to look at available stations in Paris or Krakow and drill in), but it’s an option I might like and use often.
3. I’ve noticed a bug (I think) when I search & the autocomplete comes up, I click on it to play – and I get a spinner for a long time. I abandon that station and click to play on another – and the first station continues to try and connect/buffer and the second doesn’t attempt to play until I click on it a second time.