{"id":6195,"date":"2012-09-27T12:40:57","date_gmt":"2012-09-27T10:40:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/?p=6195"},"modified":"2012-12-11T16:17:29","modified_gmt":"2012-12-11T15:17:29","slug":"spotradio-the-improved-android-app-blends-your-music-with-your-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/?p=6195","title":{"rendered":"SpotRadio: the improved Android app blends your music with your social media"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-6201\" title=\"spotradio\" src=\"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/spotradio.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"78\" height=\"78\" \/>I\u2019m happy to announce that I\u2019ve recently improved on a project of mine. An Android app I designed some time ago, <a href=\"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/internet-technology\/radiome-the-android-app-that-blends-your-music-with-your-social-media.html\">RadioMe<\/a>, has been upgraded to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.radiomeapp.com\/spotradio\/\">SpotRadio<\/a>. I came up with the idea of a \u201csocial media DJ\u201d while on a bike ride. I usually would listen to music, but I hated the thought of not knowing what was going on around me, of not being connected. I had to stop mid-bike ride to check e-mails and read Facebook\/Twitter streams. RadioMe solved this problem, and SpotRadio makes it better.<\/p>\n<p>SpotRadio is a social radio that plays your Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, LinkedIn, Google Reader and SMS so you LISTEN to it instead of looking at the screen. It allows you to be listening simultaneously to any music player on your phone, for example Spotify or Play Music. When you receive updates, SpotRadio turns the music down on these players, and turns it up again as soon as you\u2019re up-to-date.<\/p>\n<p>You can configure how frequently you want to be updated, and how many updates should be read during the \u201csocial break\u201d. To make it easy, you only need to define the \u201cmusic period\u201d and the \u201cupdate period\u201d (e.g. ten minutes listening to music, then two minutes social updates, then back to music for ten minutes&#8230;). It\u2019s perfect for when you ride your bike, drive around in your car or simply prefer to hear what\u2019s going on rather than reading it.<\/p>\n<p>The app is multilingual, so it can read updates in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and even in Japanese and Simplified Chinese. You just have to tell SpotRadio which languages to detect. If you get an incoming call, SpotRadio pauses automatically. You can configure the volume of the music\/updates, whether you want SpotRadio to stop reading upon shaking, temporarily turn off certain providers, etc. Duplicate updates are automatically recognized and only one will be read. The notification bar at the top of your Android\u2019s screen indicates whether SpotRadio is talking, downloading updates or waiting.<\/p>\n<p>One really important aspect is the speech synthesis. The standard PICO TTS voice included in every Android device sounds like a robot from the 80\u2019s with a cold. So if you want to use this app more comfortably, you should definitely install SVOX TTS from the Android Market- it sounds better and is quite cheap. I designed SpotRadio, and it was built by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/albertoruibal\">Alberto Alonso Ruibal<\/a>.<\/p>\n<div id=\"mainphotoarea\"><\/div><div class=\"theme-buttons\"><div class=\"fb-like\" data-href=\"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/?p=6195\" data-send=\"false\" data-layout=\"box_count\" data-width=\"71\" data-show-faces=\"false\" data-font=\"arial\" data-locale=\"en_US\"><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m happy to announce that I\u2019ve recently improved on a project of mine. An Android app I designed some time ago, RadioMe, has been upgraded to SpotRadio. I came up with the idea of a \u201csocial media DJ\u201d while on a bike ride. I usually would listen to music, but I hated the thought of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[584,587,586],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6195"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6195"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6207,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6195\/revisions\/6207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.martinvarsavsky.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}