By Gazmaz:
Pulsar, a new Application from Rogue Amoeba, is a listening client to link to two websites, those being XM and Sirius Satellite Radio. If you don’t know what XM and Sirius Radio is, the best description is Radio without the Ads. How is this possible? Well they are both subscription sites, XM costs $8 a month Sirius costs $13 a month. This gives you roughly 60 to 80 channels with some great content and no Ads.
Now in the UK we already have pretty good Radio, especially the BBC with little in the way of advertising. I say little because of course they do advertise their own programs. But I must admit, I have listened to commercial Radio over here, which is popular, but it drives me crazy!
And what if I can’t find what I’m after via the BBC?
So why would you want this application? To this point, to hear these stations you needed a satellite receiver to be able to listen, well this app gives you the ability to listen over the web. There are some other apps that allow you to do the same but if you’re into audio and you’re using a Mac, then you know that Rogue Amoeba has a speciality in this field, you could also access XM and Sirius over the web but the interfaces were a little clunky at best.
One of the biggest reasons for the application is the ability to stream the content around your house using Rogue Amoeba’s other application, AirFoil. Pulsar links really well into Airfoil, giving you the ability to stream to any Airport Express, Apple TV, why they even support Windows, and if you have AirFoil capable speakers then you’ll be able to stream to those as well. So you can see that when you combine Pulsar with Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil your getting a real useful combination. Your house can be filled with the content you want. I could also talk about Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro here as well which allows you to record the music as well, but I’m moving to far away from what I’m supposed to be reviewing.
So after downloading and installing the app you are asked if you have either an XM or Sirius Account, which of course I did not, so I grabbed my 3 day trial of both services, and looking through the list of channels you probably will only subscribe to one or the other services as the channels are similar. Once I’d got the accounts up and running, Pulsar gave me a list of the available channels in basically 3 views. Logo View, a small icon of the station the channel number, description and currently playing music, you also get a play button which becomes a stop button on the channel that’s playing and a small icon of a heart, when this icon is highlighted the channel becomes a favorite. By clicking this icon again you delete it as a favorite. The second view has no icon but has channel number, the play/stop button, and the Favorite option. The last view is a list of your favorites only in the first view format.
At the top of the application you have a further Play/Stop button, a volume control, a display with a graphic EQ type display, no control over the EQ by the way, and the 3 view options icons.
Now the app does take a bit of real estate on your desktop. You can minimize, but that’s not a good answer and if I were paying for the app, I’d have liked an option to have the player with reduced controls on the menu bar. Also the keyboard player controls that you can use with iTunes do not work with the app, shame on that one.
Well the streaming seemed to work flawlessly, and the app performed well, but I do have a 20MB download speed, so I cannot say how well your streaming will work of course, but being light audio you shouldn’t have any issues.
So would I use this app after the review? Well to be honest no, and mainly that’s because if you live outside of the US and Canada you can’t subscribe to either of the services unless you have a billing address in the US, so from the apps perspective, it would be nice to add an option to grab other internet radio. Would I pay for a XM or Sirius account? Well not living in the US and not knowing the annoyance of constant ads and perhaps not being able to find the right channel, then it’s difficult for me to say.
Overall, this app does exactly what it says on the tin. It has a few very small UI quibbles, but as I said, if you already own a Rogue Amoeba app, then you can get them working together, that with the fact if you’re also an XM or Sirius subscriber, then it’s a no-brainer, just get it. Pulsar certainly worked smoothly and, in fact, I got a little hooked on going through and listening to the different radio stations.
You need at least a copy of Leopard as the app is not supported on Tiger, and Pulsar costs $15.00 standalone but if you already own any of the other Rogue Amoeba software then as I said the application is Free. Run over to www.rogueamoeba.com/pulsar.
Tags: Mac, pulsar, rogue amoeba, shareware, sirius, Software, xm
