[tweetmeme]Remember when streaming audio over the Internet was a slow and painful process? The quality was garbage and you had to deal with .asx files in Windows Media Player and all the crap that RealPlayer would install on your system? It was an awful experience, that I’m glad I’ll never have to relive. But it’s not like I even listen to streaming audio over the net anymore. I mean, I’ve got a 100Mpbs fiber line that runs directly into the back of my brain here in Japan, and I’m slowly being turned into a cylon. I can just download entire albums of music in less time than it takes to listen to a single song being streamed over the net. The whole idea of Internet radio seems a little pointless to me at this point. There are some people still out there producing and consuming streaming audio on the Internet though. I suppose that if you’re into less than mainstream music, it’s still a viable way to listen to music. You’re not really gonna find standard radio stuff on Internet streams the way you used to be able to. That stuff’s been clamped down on so hard that you’d just be begging the RIAA to nail you if you tried playing your hair metal collection from your garage on the Internet.

I reviewed Snowtape for Mac a while back on this very site. I reviewed it because it was a cool looking app with neat functionality. If Internet radio’s your thing, Snowtape’s about as good as it gets for listening to, recording, and cataloging streaming audio. The problem is, it’s hard to find good content. This is no fault of Snowtape. It’s a great app, but if Aperture or Lightroom only had access to out of focus snapshots taken by handicapped first graders, you probably wouldn’t find much use for them either. So while I acknowledge the quality of the app itself, I don’t have much use for it.

Now there’s an iPhone version of Snowtape. I’m not talking about their remote control app that works with the desktop version. I mean a real Internet radio app that records songs and lets you organize them on your phone. The design of the app is simple and tasteful. It uses standard iPhone UI elements. It looked like a steel Things to me when I first opened it up. Even the app’s icon is a super simple steel colored cassette tape. I gotta say that I’m starting to wonder if using tape is the best symbolism for recording stuff now. If someone even five years younger than me thinks of recording audio, I doubt cassette tapes are going to pop into their head. I remember winding tapes when I was a kid, but a high school kid with an iPhone now might not.

As far as the mechanics of the app go, you can look through a directory of audio streams that are sorted by genre, but that’s it. You can’t sort by country (although you can see a flag next to the stream’s title) and you can’t just search like you can in the desktop version. There are a couple video game music streams that I’ve listened to on the desktop Snowtape that I couldn’t find on my iPhone. Also, you can’t just plug in the address of a stream that you already know of. You’re stuck with these genre breakdowns, and it’s a pain to find stuff. There’s already a lot of crap out there, and the iPhone version of Snowtape doesn’t help you weed through it. I wish you could sync up with the desktop version and import the stations you’ve marked as favorites. That alone would alleviate a lot of the problems with finding good content. Should you happen to find something that you like, you can record it to your iPhone, but instead of just hitting a record button, you have to wait a couple minutes for the tracks you’ve been listening to to show up in a list and then you can choose which ones you want to save. You can then organize your saved recordings in folders, but you can’t share them. This isn’t Vemedio, the developer’s fault. The feature was in there, but Apple wouldn’t approve the app with the sharing feature still in there. It was quite a to-do, and Vemedio even provided media outlets and customers on its mailing list with plenty of information about the whole ordeal, including links to other apps in the App Store that let users share recorded Internet radio.

I have to say though, that even if the sharing feature had been allowed to be left in there, I don’t find Snowtape for iPhone a compelling piece of software. I like the desktop app a lot. Its search function makes it a lot easier to find stations that might have stuff I want to listen to. The lack of search in the iPhone app is a huge minus. The app looks very nice, but appealing design alone doesn’t justify purchase. And even if you like the idea of Internet radio on the go, do you really need to record it? And if you record it, since you can’t do anything with it, what good is that recorded content? You’re better off listening to stuff you’re more apt to like in last.fm’s iPhone app, and just remember to download it later on. Snowtape for iPhone is just $1.99, but I don’t see a reason to buy it.