Radio Activity

The Radio activity allows you to play streaming audio from internet radio stations in your application.

It's similar to the Audio activity, with additional support for SHOUTcast and Icecast streaming audio.

Example

Adding a Radio Activity

To add a Radio activity to your project: start editing your project and go to the Activities tab. Under Add an Activity, click the Radio icon to create a new activity.

Activity Settings

Activity Name

The name for this activity. The name will appear on the dashboard and as the activity's title on the action bar. It can be whatever you want. For example: "National Public Radio"

Description

A few words describing this activity. This text may be displayed on the dashboard as a subtitle when it's Show Subtitle Text setting is enabled.

Position

A relative index that controls the order of the activities in your application. The position affects where your activity is displayed on the dashboard and in the action bar drop down. You can use any value you want; all that matters is how the value compares to the position indexes of other activities.

For more information on this setting please read: How to change the order of the icons on the dashboard

Activity Icon

Current Icon

This shows the icon that will be used to represent this activity on the dashboard.

Upload Icon Image

This is where you can select the icon that will be used to represent this activity on the dashboard.

Radio Details

Radio Type

The type of radio URL you're connecting to. Choose from the following three options:

• Playlist - an .m3u, .pls, or .asx file containing links to individual audio tracks
• SHOUTcast Playlist - an .m3u, .pls, or .asx file containing links to SHOUTcast/Icecast server streams
• SHOUTcast Stream - a direct link to a SHOUTcast/Icecast server stream

Choosing Playlist or SHOUTcast Playlist will make the app treat the URL as a playlist file. It will attempt to download the file at that URL and parse it in order to expand it into individual tracks.

Choosing SHOUTcast Playlist or SHOUTcast Stream will make the app treat the URL as a SHOUTcast or Icecast server. It will connect to the server every 30 to 60 seconds in order to retrieve metadata about the radio channel and the current song. If successful, this information will be shown above the media controls at the bottom of the screen:

Note: not all SHOUTcast servers provide this information. If your channel doesn't transmit the song titles, you may want to switch to the Playlist setting so your app doesn't use any bandwidth attempting to retrieve the metadata.

URL

The URL of your playlist or SHOUTcast stream. Make sure you choose the appropriate Radio Type for the file this URL points to.

For example, http://yp.shoutcast.com/sbin/tunein-station.pls?id=21585 is the URL to a SHOUTcast playlist file.

Appearance

Track Titles

The color that will be used for the titles in the track list.

Track Descriptions

The color that will be used for the descriptions in the track list.

Current Image

This shows the (optional) background image that will be displayed behind the list of audio tracks.

Upload Background Image

This is where you can select a background image that will be displayed behind the list of audio tracks.

Background Effect

You can have Andromo apply an effect to your background image, for example to make the text easier to read.

• None

  Does not apply any effect to your image (your image remains unchanged).

• Frosted

  Overlays a translucent layer over your image, giving it a subtle "frosted" look that helps improve the contrast of text without changing the colors in your original background image too much.

• Midnight

  Converts your image to greyscale and reduces its intensity, resulting in a cool dark background that works well with the standard text colors.