We’ve been work­ing with Patrick Moun­teney of Kalei­do­scop­ic Cre­ations to cre­ate a new VCRa­dio-spe­cif­ic App for iOS and Android devices. As you can see from the images above, this new ver­sion of the app dis­plays cov­er art for the track that’s play­ing (whether you are lis­ten­ing or not). It appears as a thumb­nail, but if you tap on it the art expands to full screen width (and tap it again to go back to the thumb­nail). In addi­tion, the app indi­cates the title and artist cur­rent­ly on the stream — just tap the “Play” but­ton to lis­ten and “Stop” to stop. There’s also a News page drawn from the VCRa­dio web site, a 7‑day playlist, and a con­tact page. PLUS we’ve added the abil­i­ty to select either the 64kbps AAC stream (rec­om­mend­ed) or the orig­i­nal 128kbps mp3 stream. The AAC stream gives you at least as high audio qual­i­ty, while at the same time using half the band­width — great if you are on a tight data plan or restrict­ed band­width. How­ev­er, only the mp3 stream can be accessed in-world.

The cov­er art dis­play is not per­fect — if it can’t find a high-res­o­lu­tion cov­er art image it will do a Google search and try and find one there, which may be a bit blur­ry or even for the wrong piece entire­ly! And due to laten­cy across the inter­net, you’ll some­times see tracks that have been played recent­ly or are just com­ing up. But it’s a lot more fun than nothing.

The lat­est iOS and Android ver­sions are avail­able for down­load here:

We’re work­ing to devel­op these apps fur­ther, for exam­ple to include bet­ter album cov­er art dis­play — watch this space!

Live365 itself also makes iOS and Android mobile apps avail­able so you can lis­ten to mem­ber sta­tions on the go.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the Live365 apps don’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly tune to VCR — you can use them to lis­ten to any Live365 sta­tion — so you need to search for “Vir­tu­al Com­mu­ni­ty Radio” to locate us and start lis­ten­ing. Click the heart icon to label it as a Favourite and off you go!

Due to music licens­ing agree­ments, these apps are avail­able in the UK, US and Cana­da only at this time.

If you have any issues regard­ing these apps or lis­ten­ing to the sta­tion, please email info@vcradio.org