Look, we try to post news at Ausdroid, not olds. This is firmly in the latter category, but I have an excuse. Let me tell you some more. I’ve listened to Digitally Imported Radio for years … in fact, probably from when it first started broadcasting in 1999. Digitally Imported is one of the best places I’ve found, online, to access a wide range of electronic music, which I rather enjoy. They cater for all genres, from breakbeat, to big beat, to dance, trance, dubstep, chill and more. In fact, there are dozens upon dozens of channels, and if you’re into your electronica, there’s something there for all of you.
It’s probably because I’ve listened for so long that this (recently) new and much in-demand feature somehow snuck into Digitally Imported’s Android app without me even noticing. It was only this morning, in fact, that I stumbled across the feature, when Digitally Imported’s free streams stopped working on our Bose Soundtouch 10. There’s a lot of reasons for that (primarily licensing, and because Bose uses vTuner, which doesn’t allow custom streams… piece of junk) but the executive summary is that I needed a way to cast my favourite radio to the office sound system.
There is the option of Bluetooth pairing, but that’s kind of rubbish; the range is too limited. However, with the use of a Chromecast Audio, I can now throw my Digitally Imported to the soundsystem without having to keep my phone within Bluetooth range, or even keeping it turned on.
This new feature came out in November 2015, and though it supports Chromecast Audio (great for me) it supports ordinary Chromecast and Android TV too, meaning you can throw it to your loungeroom TV as well. Chromecasting isn’t the only new feature in the latest release either; other new features include the ability to find and listen to (some) shows on demand, and there’s a limited ability to scrub through on-demand tracks (you can’t scrub the radio broadcasts though…). Other nifty inclusions are show calendars so you can see when your favourite show is on next, and you can even subscribe to various Digitally Imported show calendars in Google Calendar, to get updates wherever you happen to be (though this isn’t done through the app).
