Wunder Radio

My initial understanding of Wunder Radio was that it was a weather-radio app provided by Weather Underground. As it turns out, the app has a much greater scope than that, and it acts as a global radio tuner that can access stations from all over the world.

Wunder Radio has an impressive number of stations to select from, as well as a wide variety of methods to search them. The app can seek out local stations by GPS, or you can browse categories such as sports, talk, music, world music, location, and most popular. Each category also has subcategories to search. If you know the name of a station you want to listen to, you can run a search that way, as well.

Searching the world over for radio stations can be exhilarating. Although commercial radio turns out to be remarkably similar across most locations, there are random gems to be found. For example, Antarctica has a radio station dedicated to playing American folk-guitar instrumentals. Africa is host to radio stations playing extraordinary music that you are unlikely to hear anywhere else. In addition to standard AM and FM stations, you'll find a host of other station directories, including subscription radio and various Internet radio archives.

Once you start discovering stations, you can add them to your favorites, making it easy to return to them. Also, after you have started listening to stations, the app creates a Recently Played category.

Unfortunately, some stations can take a moment to load, and some others don't seem to load at all. As the help page explains, since the app relies on bandwidth, a station may struggle to play if you are in an area with a slower network. Somewhat ironically, the most difficulty I experienced was in trying to listen to any of the U.S. National Weather Service stations. Still, most radio stations load with no problems.

At $7 (as of this writing), Wunder Radio is not exactly cheap by Android app standards. Considering the breadth of content that it makes available, however, it is easily a worthwhile purchase.