Sunday, July 29, 2007

TUN3R: old skool radio discovery



Kooky interface of the week award goes to radio discovery site TUN3R which presents visitors with a giant radio 'dial' populated with thumbnail images of assorted online radio stations. Drag the 'needle' over a thumbnail and you hear a recent sample of the station's output. Beneath the dial you get details of the streaming format and location, a screengrab of the station's homepage and a sample of the recent playlist (if available).

Randomly clicking around the mosaic proves entertaining for a minute or two, although it's the search functionality which is more likely to generate a genuine musical match; typing in the name of an artist highlights every station on the dial which has recently played one of their tracks. Nice. You can also filter by genre or language or search the contents of the station's homepage. Most of the featured stations are promoted for free, although there also an option to buy space in a million dollar homepage stylee.

Whilst I suspect I may not be revisiting TUN3R on a regular basis, it's a interesting attempt to recreate the physicality of analogue radio's dial-twiddling experience (you even get a touch of static when you're roving around the dial) and much more compelling than a list of the stations could ever be.

1 comment:

Neil Hepburn said...

Listeners visiting TUN3R.com will now be able to visit any one of the ten new “City Dials”. Each City Dial
displays a tiled mosaic of all Webcasting AM/FM stations for the given city. Stations are ordered as they
would be on a traditional AM/FM tuner. The cities featured are: Toronto; New York City; Nashville; London;
Paris; Glasgow; Stuttgart; Rome; Seoul; and Buenos Aires. Each City Dial can be accessed via a dedicated
web address (e.g. nyc.tun3r.com, london.tun3r.com, paris.tun3r.com). For some cities, all AM/FM stations
are available as streams. Additionally, over 350 Internet stations are featured adjacent to the local AM/FM
stations. For the first time, listeners will be able to seamlessly browse between terrestrial and Internet radio.