Update: Great Again! ** Radium 2 was solid and great, Radium 3 has improvements but is unstable

Update for 3.0.10: This app is once again fantastic! Working stations, very rare crashes and malfunctions. Just works. Thanks for the great work!

Old 3.0.7 review:
We’ve been using Radium for a few years and every single use under version 2 was just great. No bugs to speak of, only that some radio stations would stop working when the URL or some other detail would change. But there is a place in the app to request “repairing” a station or adding a new one and this was always handled very promptly (usually 24 hours) and effectively.

When Radium 3 was added to the app store, they immediately stopped supporting Radium 2 and its station database. When enough were not working anymore, it was time to pay for the new version.

The main improvement is the initial loading speed of the radio stations in the menu as well as the search speed: it’s pretty much immediate. That was the biggest drawback of version 2 and is a huge plus.

Unfortunately, there have been severe bugs that successive minor versions (currently 3.0.7) have attempted to address for the last 6 months but persist:
- The most annoying are frequent disconnections (sometimes every few minutes) of some radio stations (it’s not an unstable stream, because I am using TuneIn on my iPhone with the same radio stations and there are only maybe one disconnection in 5 hours, always very short and self reconnection). The “fix” is to manually stop and play again; when that doesn’t work, switch to another station and back...
- Adding/repairing radio stations is now taking at best a few days; it took almost two weeks last time and their customer service rep complained that the maintenance is too heavy, which makes me wonder where the service will go from here.
- Searches sometimes (half the time) just don’t work or take minutes to return a result (the icon just spins).
- There is no permanent scroll bar to scroll through the list of favorite radio stations even if the “Always show scroll bars” in the “General” System Preference is set. We use a Mac Mini as a media center with a Lenovo Mini keyboard, making it impossible to scroll. That’s where the search bug above makes the app unusable. We have to quit it and restart a few times before the search works again.

On the other hand, the icon already changed twice since the move to v3… First a chocolate heart, now an antenna on a red target… Sure, whatever, the icon doesn’t really matter to me. But please focus your resources on usability. And the best icon what the yellow 70’s radio in v2 (and I’m not that old that it would be nostalgia or anything).

We are at the point of looking for an alternative. I will send this to their support and write another review when the reliability is improved in a future version. If that doesn’t happen in the next month or two, we will find another option that works better.

pascalsnick about Radium ~ Perfect Internet Radio, v3.0.10