Greatest Hits Radio 4+

I’ve listened to radio since I was a boy with very happy memories of the top 20 on a Sunday night along with great songs of the 70’s and 80’s. Naturally as we get older music styles move on appealing to new generations. My Dad certainly didn’t appreciate my tastes in music having grown up with his big band sound which at the time you can’t understand but now you can as the songs you grow up which form and mould those happy times as a child and teenager.
Greatest hits radio has brought many of those wonderful times back, relating those special songs to times we remember. Also all of the dj’s have also been there when we grew up. I have now returned to tuning in to GHR from morning to night including the very enjoyable Andy Crane late at night. I wish you huge success in increasing listeners as I would like you to carry on for many years to come. Thanks GHR

Don’t get me wrong, I love Greatest Hits Radio, but the app, is awful, especially with Apple Play. When you get into your car, trying to get GH to play takes some coxing. You can’t just get it to play where it left off the night before, you have to go to the station list, scroll down through all the many stations, then once you get GH, you have to chose the region. Even then, when you get to the region you want to play, nothing happens, so you have to go back select another region, that usually starts playing, so then you can go back again and select the region you want to hear. And because this takes so long, you have started driving. Then while you are driving, the station will cut out (usually timed for Quiz master), maybe the station will come back, maybe it won’t, then you have to go through all this again, select station, region…. Etc…. I realise some of this is due to the network signal strength, but even when it is showing full signal, it suffers. Goodness knows how we are going to get self driving cars to work on 5g when we can’t even get a radio station to work!

Great station, here’s what needs fixing with the app, and / or Alexa streaming. 1) The constant drop-outs of audio, my Wi-Fi is over 200mb speed, so bandwidth not an issue, but it’s always dropping connection. However, rarely when streaming via MacBook to HomePod, so it seems it’s an Alexa stream issue. 2) Apple CarPlay - will not auto play the main GHR station. Have to go into settings, find GHR, then find the variant and eventually it’ll play. Far too much faffing about. (I do have the region set in settings, but it ignores that). This makes the CarPlay experience terrible for end users. 3) Why no Favourites / Bookmarks / Following for actual stations? We have them for shows / catch-ups etc. there are circa 100 stations available through the app and I can’t easily bookmark and get to one, that’s a lot of unnecessary searching. See point 2) CarPlay experience terrible.

The two main things that should be addressed first though are; 1) Allow adding stations to favourites / bookmark. 2) Sort out CarPlay functionality as it really is a very poor experience.