Home > Consumer Reviews > Aluratek AIRJ01F USB Internet Radio Jukebox

It's pretty straight-forward: it lets you listen to thousands of radio stations that broadcast on the Net. As I write this review, I am sitting here, on the US East Coast, listening to some Icelandic rock station. In the past couple of hours I browsed through radio stations based in France, the Philippines, UK and, I believe Thailand. Pretty cool, eh?

But, let's summarize:

Installation: super-easy. You stick the USB thing into the proper port and you get prompted to allow for the software to install on your computer - at least that's what Vista does.

Interface: you get 2 top-10 lists that can be expanded to top-100, by region or by genre. The tops are not too useful, unless you really believe that the number one talk station in the world is broadcasting from Bulgaria but, it's fun to have them there. The categories are usually hit and miss - you are almost as likely to find music on a 'talk' station as your are to find actual talk but... it's no big deal, believe me. The stations are also classified by Genre and Location and, within each of these, you can sort them by 'country' - not all stations have a country assigned to them and Kansas and Kenya are both viewed as 'countries'. You can include individual stations on your favorite list and you can vote them up or down. There is also a 'history' section, a 'help' section and a link to the maker of the product. Oh, the bottom of the window is reserved for advertising but, I bet, you are NOT likely to stare at the Aluratek windows while listening to the radio so it's not bothersome.

Reception: each station shows a number of bars, telephone style - 4 bars are supposed to be the clearest and no bars you probably can't get. The quality of your connection is, without a doubt, dependent of your own bandwidth. Depending of it and depending on many other factors, your connection may break from time to time or you may not be able to connect at all but, so far, I am happy with what I get.

Why I almost took out 1 star?

- The interface could be improved. What I definitely miss is the ability to enter my own little notes to the stations that I mark as 'favorites'. The way they appear now - which could be something like 'WKZR' or maybe a string of Chinese hieroglyphs - is not always descriptive enough.

To summarize: if you spend a few hundred $$ for your laptop, I can't think of any good justification for not spending $20-30 on this little device.
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October 2, 2008 Update

I learned from a related discussion thread that there are 'free' sites that allow access to thousands of radio stations with some search capabilities. http://www.vtuner.com is one of them. Some may prefer to use such a site for their radio listening and save some money. Personally, having purchased this device, I am more likely to use IT than Vtuner but this is my personal preference only.

The Aluratek Internet Radio Jukebox is great for finding & surfing radio stations around the world and playing them through a single interface. It performs this task very well. I had it up and running on my home PC in no time, just as advertised. Reasons I didn't give it 5 stars:

- The interface itself is clunky, cryptic and a bit slow. It's easy enough to use, just kind of awkward.

- It does not necessarily work on "locked down" office workstations. Although it doesn't need to install software to run, it does need to put a special driver in your Windows directory. Not a deal-breaker by any means, but something to be aware of.

All in all, the Internet Radio Jukebox is great for exploring Internet radio stations. If you'd like that process made simpler and more convenient, then you'll probably be happy with it. Otherwise, it's no different from just bookmarking your favorite stations with your Web browser.

I discovered this Aluratek AIRJ01F USB internet radio stick as an Amazon promotion. The idea that I could be anywhere in the world but easily hear my local radio stations sounded great. (Or vice versa -- easily find broadcasts worldwide.) After checking the handful of reviews, I decided to take a chance -- hardly a big loss if it didn't pan out. Well, I'm glad I did. It arrived in two days. I opened the package. The instructions said, "Plug it into the USB port." I did (on my laptop which runs Vista) and, lo and behold, the application immediately began to run, and a huge directory of worldwide web radio stations came up, organized in several different ways, and easily searchable. In seconds, I was listening to my home town radio station. One click later, I was checking out a station half a world away!

Then a friend called and, in passing, he mentioned that he never gets to hear broadcasts of his old college's football games, because the school is 600 miles away, and he often travels, anyway. I recommended this! Could he figure out how to get the webcasts without this inexpensive device? Maybe....No, obviously not. This makes finding numerous stations so easy, no matter where you are or what computer you're using.

One issue: I tried plugging it into a secure laptop which runs Windows XP, and the self-starting app did not run automatically. I'm still trying to track down the ActiveX setting which is preventing this. But, no problem, anyway: All you have to do is create a shortcut to the application on your desktop, and then clicking that will start it up.

Nifty and inexpensive little thing, makes staying local, or going global, with your web radio, so easy! These will make great Christmas gifts, too!

Overall, I'd say this product is pretty nifty.
The pros:
- Access to thousands of internet radio stations, mostly commercial free. It's wasn't hard to play around and find cool stations I didn't even know existed. Though really, how many of those foreign language stations am I going to listen to if I don't speak the language?
- Plug and play device. All you need is a USB port and no additional software is needed. So once you have your settings/favorites set up you can take this thing anywhere and have music to listen to (e.g., work, home, etc.) And I for one definitely appreciate not having yet another media software player on my computer.
- Relatively inexpensive and it's a one-time cost.
- User interface is pretty straightforward. You can search by music genre (over 50 genre choices) or radio station name. You can even see the top 10 stations (as voted by users) by genre or region. It's easy to add stations to your "my favorites" folder and you can also browse your listening history. You can even see station transmission rates (kpbs) to identify potentially slow stations and there's a button to directly launch a station's website, which is helpful.
- You can vote for stations you like and I think Aluratek adds up all your votes to tabulate their ranking lists. So theoretically over time, really good stations will stand out as more users vote for their favorites.

And now the cons:
- Search and browse functions could be improved. You can't easily sort by region and genre. Similarly the ranking feature (whether its top 100 stations or top 10 by genre, etc.) is a work in progress. I found I spent a lot of time browsing stations that were top 10, but mediocre at best. But since it's user based ratings, hopefully that aspect improves with time.
- This device is basically a storage unit for software. So the sound quality of the broadcast is basically as good as the website broadcasting it. This is unlike a Rhapsody (which I subscribe to) for example, that maintains sound quality through its own network.
- You can't download, record or even see the songs being played. I guess this isn't surprising but that's a huge difference from a pay service like Rhapsody where you can listen to songs with good fidelity and then instantly be able to download ones you like. It would have been nice if there was a rip/record feature to the software that lets you record, even better if you could do it on the USB drive itself.
- It takes up a USB port and you have to remember to bring it around. For my laptop, it seems like it would have been easier to just give me a software download so I wouldn't have to bring any other device around period.

Still, all in all, its a pretty cool little device. If for no other reason than to be able to monitor top stations, search for new interesting ones and do it all in one place.

I got the jukebox for Xmas. I got it to work on Vista Ultimate and have no complaints. The jukebox is a complete waste of money! A person can down load Winamp(free download) and go to www.shoutcast.com and get over 10,000 streaming radio stations at no cost, Further the shoutcast website also has a shoutcast player! All of these services are free. Why pay $20 plus for a USB flash drive when you don't have too. Further you can't loose a Winamp player or Shoutcast Player!!