PRX Relaunches Its iPhone App, Now Lets You Download All Your Favorite Public Radio Programs

The Public Radio Player app for the iPhone has been a round for a while now, but today, Cambridge-based Public Radio Exchange (PRX) is relaunching the app with a revamped visual design, new interface and, maybe most importantly, the ability to download episodes of shows so you can listen to This American Life, Radiolab, Car Talk or any of the other more than 1000 public radio programs and podcasts offline.

The redesign makes the app a lot easier to navigate now, but the highlight of this 3.0 release is obviously the ability to save shows for offline listening. While you could, of course, always download the podcasts of virtually all of the popular NPR, APM or PRI programs, the Public Radio Player app makes it quite a bit easier to find interesting shows from NPR affiliates than iTunes. The app, of course, also still lets you listen to your favorite stations online and make donations to your favorite stations (it wouldn’t be Public Radio without it , after all).

pbx_radio_player_new_designAlso new in the app are breaking news headlines and tweets from stations, as well as an improved search experience and better stream reliability.

Still missing, though, is an official PRX app for Android. While a number of programs like This American Life offer Android apps, PRX itself doesn’t current offer one and cites “capacity and funding to develop for additional platforms at this time” as the reason for this. If you are an iPhone user and you want easy access to your favorite NPR programs, the PRX Public Radio Player is definitely worth a try.