How much data does TuneIn radio use

A few years back, households had huge stereo systems for radio which would force you to have enough batteries or access to a power outlet to listen to music and news. Now smartphones have reduced these bulky and power-demanding devices into an app on the phone.

Armed with a battery charge and an internet connection, you can tune in to your favorite radio stations and catch your favorite shows, news, podcasts, and music even when on the road. One of the best streaming apps is TuneIn Radio which aggregates real live radio stations from around the world, podcasts and neatly organizes them by categories. The app is free but one can upgrade and get rid of ads and access to the live radio recording feature.

TuneIn Radio uses about 60 – 150MB per hour which translates to around 1.75MB per minute on average. This depends on the bitrate the app runs on.

TuneIn Radio requires data to playback streams from radio stations. When connected to Wi-Fi, it won’t eat into your data plan. To understand how much data TuneIn radio consumes, we will have to base it on the bitrate which is the sound quality of the content streamed. A higher bitrate means a higher sound quality. Each station however provides its one stream to listeners which vary from one station to the other. This means that the amount of data consumed by the app will depend on the radio station that you listen to and for how long.

You can however choose the quality stream from the station settings ranging from 48kbps to 320kbps. For this article, we compared between 128kbps (standard) and 320kbps with the latter being categorized as high resolution. The difference between the two streaming qualities is that the lower quality loads faster and is more reliable but it may have poorer sound quality. The high resolution has a better sound quality but may take longer to load and uses more data.

The 128kbps stream uses around an MB per minute which rounds up to 60MB in an hour whether on a 3G, 4G, or 5G network. For a 320kbps stream quality, TuneIn Radio consumes about 100MB per hour on whichever network. This means that a 128kbps-stream consumes an MB per minute while a 320kbps-stream uses about 2.5MB per minute. So when you lower the stream rate, you get to slash your data usage by more than half.

How to change the stream quality of a radio station

To change the stream quality on TuneIn Radio is simple. Open the TuneIn app and play your desired station. On the ‘Now Playing’ screen click on the Menu button denoted by a square button with 3 horizontal lines. From the menu, tap on Choose Stream and you should be able to see the available streams that the station has. You can choose your preferred stream quality with a lower stream quality translating to less data consumption.

How to improve TuneIn Radio’s performance

Most of the time we use radio apps in our cars andTuneIn Radio has a number of features to help you save your data as well as improving your listening experience. Under Advanced Settings, you can turn off Cellular Data to stop streaming using cellular data. This will only allow you to stream over Wi-Fi.

You can improve performance by buffering radio stations before playing. This is also a feature under advanced settings that will determine how many seconds the audio will buffer before you play the stream. This will help you reduce pauses due to buffering when the network connection is unreliable.

Another feature you can make use of is the Auto-resume which you can use to automatically resume a stream when you go away from your Wi-Fi and then come back later. Podcasts can be auto-downloaded when on Wi-Fi and then get to listen to them when offline. This can save you on cellular data while still enjoying your favorite podcasts.

Conclusion

Internet radio has revolutionized the industry with an app like TuneIn Radio giving you access to over 100, 000 radio stations and over 5M podcasts from around the world. This is something a regular radio won’t give you. The radio comes in handy when we’re on the road traveling or camping and you don’t have access to a Wi-Fi hotspot. You then have to use Cellular data which you can conserve using various ways highlighted in this article.

FAQs

Why does TuneIn Radio keep repeating?

When your connection is not reliable, you may experience buffering frequently making the audio repeat. This can be solved by having a stable internet connection or using the ‘Buffer Before Playing’ feature. This feature will help reduce the buffering temporarily by giving you a head start.

Can I use TuneIn Radio offline?

Yes, you can by downloading podcasts when on Wi-Fi and then listening to them offline.