There’s a new free hi-res music streaming app on iPhone and Android with no ads and no subscription — I tried it, and immediately I’m having more fun with discovery than on Spotify

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While Macs aren’t officially supported, you can grab the iPhone version from the Mac App Store. I’ve done that on my Mac, and can confirm it runs perfectly on macOS 27.

The app was created by Bojan Vidanovic, who explained on r/BudgetAudiophile that “I wanted an easier way to find and listen to lossless radio stations. It brings together handpicked stations streaming in FLAC, from CD-quality to Hi-Res options across jazz, classical, rock, electronic, and more.”

The response has been really positive, and having tried it, I’d say that’s because it’s a really nice app.

The catch is: there is no catch, as far as I can see. The app and website connects you to internet radio stations, who presumably have all the necessary permissions and licenses in place to ensure the artists they play get paid. The app itself is ad-free, but some of the stations play ads to pay the bills, naturally.

The joy here is serendipity: there’s no algorithm serving you up endless variations of the songs you already like, so you can end up with truly random listening: for example I’ve just gone from Daft Punk to French jazz to Underworld deep cuts to the new Beck album to Culture Club to, er, Alien Ant Farm.

And the sound quality is consistently excellent because all of the stations are broadcasting in FLAC at CD quality or better. I’ve listened to a whole bunch on my favorite headphones and the only one that sounded horrible was playing Alien Ant Farm.

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This is very much a work in progress — things like equalization, Google Cast and AirPlay are on the to-do list — but it’s a very impressive starting point and Bojan is actively seeking feedback on Reddit. The plan is apparently to keep the core app free and monetize it with additional paid features at some point in the future.

Obviously, this is no replacement for the likes of Spotify, if you’re an audiophile who gets frustrated with the discovery options of the big music services, this could give you a great alternative: a wide mix of music, all in quality to show off what the best wired headphones combined with a nice headphone DAC can do.

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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.

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