There are many options for listening to online radio in the car, and we will tell you about them in order of our preference rating. Read more about internet radio here.
- Through an App on Your Smartphone or Tablet
We consider this option the easiest and most accessible to almost everyone. Agree, it’s almost impossible to find a person today without a smartphone or tablet connected to the Internet via cellular network. Most drivers daily use a smartphone or tablet in order to find out about traffic jams or read the news while standing in these very jams. So why not add some extra work to your gadget and have it spin your favorite radio stations for you?
Okay. Let’s say you decided to install an app to listen to the radio in the car. A reasonable question arises: “And what app to choose?” And indeed, the Google Play Market and App Store are full of different applications that will spin the radio. There are single applications with just one station from its owners and all sorts of catalog applications that collect hundreds and thousands of stations for every taste from around the globe. Of course, if you’re not an avid fan of a single radio station, then you should select a station catalog application.
For example a popular application for listening to online radio in the car is a foreign development – TuneIn. The application is popular enough and has versions for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. It is very, very easy to find it in the markets.
TuneIn offers a convenient search for stations by country, city, genre, etc. Everything about it is good, except that all the streams are different, the bitrates (audio bit rates) are also different, which means that it will eat the traffic as it pleases. There are stations and mp3, in AAC and in AAC+. Some streams play well, others a little worse, and the whole responsibility for the stability of the streams in this application lies on the shoulders of the owners of these very streams. However, it’s nice that you can suggest an alternative stream for a certain radio station. The project administration will consider your application and, if no violations are found, will add the stream you’ve proposed to its catalog.
- Via Android-Based Car Stereos
Car radios based on the popular operating system Android burst into the lives of motorists relatively recently and are already rapidly gaining popularity. To date, there are a lot of different models of car radios in different sizes and tailored for specific models of cars of all the popular car brands.
What can such car radios? In short, all the same as in Android tablets. Such boomboxes have Internet access (usually via Wi-Fi) and access to the application store Google Play, which means that it is not very difficult to install applications for listening to the radio in the car.
What should you pay attention to when choosing a car radio? Perhaps the version of the operating system and the newer it is, the better. One more moment, which is important for listening to online radio, is the presence or absence of the possibility to install a SIM card. If there is no SIM card, to connect the radio to the Internet you will have to install an additional Wi-Fi router in the car or to give the Internet from your own smartphone.
- Through A USB Adapter or A “Flash” 3G Modem
There is information on the Internet, that there are such miracle devices, which can be connected to the USB-port of your car radio and send the signal from your smartphone to this adapter via Bluetooth. (If you don’t know which aftermarket stereo to buy for your Jeep, more about that here: best aftermarket radio for jeep wrangler JK.) But if a person has a smartphone or tablet with access to the Internet, and your car radio has at least an AUX input (and most car radios are equipped with such an input), then to start Internet radio in the car it is sufficient to simply connect your phone to the AUX input using a cheap cable like this. And everything will play perfectly fine, and the battery of your smartphone will not drain as quickly as it would if the audio signal was transmitted to the radio via Bluetooth.
Here we have collected recommendations from our own experience and personal observations, but which way to listen to internet radio in your car you choose – it is up to you to decide.