One of the joys of the Internet is the ability to access thousands of radio stations without the use of a separate receiver. So anytime I like I can tune into jazz in Chile, a folk station in Romania or enjoy heavy rock in Holland. It's this love of world music that inspired Dutch company Freecom to come up with its digital Internet radio, MusicPal.

Weighing a mere 600g, it almost flies out of the packaging and what you're confronted with is a relatively compact (26.5 x 11.5 x 8cm) and stylish unit in chic jet black. Clearly designed with simplicity of operation in mind, the controls are restricted to two large dials which look after volume and navigation, and additional buttons for Menu and Favourites. Positioned just above these is a comfortably large, 128 x 68-pixel LCD display, so you won't need to squint to make out which station you're tuned in to.

At the back of the machine you'll find a power input (sorry, no battery option for this baby) as well as loudspeaker outputs (for headphones or PC sound system), a line out to your hi-fi stereo and a LAN port. You can either connect to your Internet via the supplied (and rather short) Ethernet cable or make use of the built-in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi WLAN. From then on all the decisions can be made either via the LCD or by using the supplied Freecom Network Storage Application software which will help configure your PC with the MusicPal.

The 5,000 or so radio stations you can access are divided into several useful categories including country and genre, but you will notice immediately that your favourite local ILR stations and all the BBC stations (both national and local) are missing from the installed lists. This is because Freecom is using vTuner, which is not particularly UK-friendly, and in any event the MusicPal can't handle the formats in which the BBC services are streamed. Not a good start.

However, the good news is that once set up, the reception generally is pretty good. Also you can use the LAN connection to play back music files from your PC, so long as they're MP3, WAV or LPCM formats (no support yet for WMA files). The MusicPal's speaker is a measly 3W and even with the bass boosted you won't get anything like ideal sound reproduction without hooking it up to a separate sound system. But if you use it as a kitchen or lounge companion then it should provide endless hours of entertainment.

One unexpectedly welcome addition is an RSS feed capability which will scroll news headlines at the bottom of the LCD alongside the details of which station you're tuned to, and there's even an alarm facility to make sure you're woken to the dulcet strains of Dolly Parton from KBAL Thunder Country, Texas...

Verdict
£80 is a remarkably cheap price for an impressive digital Internet radio boasting 5,000 stations, MP3 playback from your PC music library and RSS news updates, despite some minor tuning and file format issues.

Company: Freecom

Contact: 01423 704700

Tags: internetradio dolly parton radio arts music sound files mp3 streaming