I am constantly in transit, whether it’s on the train to work, in the car to a friend’s house, or on a plane to cover an event. If it weren’t for N its affiliates, I would be seriously out of touch with the world everything happening in it. But sometimes I rue wading through all the different programs offerings, just want to listen to the ones I like the best. That’s what I hoped the N One app would do for me.

N One, available online on your mobile device, pegs itself as your own personalized N station. It combines reports from your local public radio affiliate with N’s own daily newscasts original programming, as well as short segments you can tune in to when you just want a few quick bites of news. You then mark what you liked listening to by tapping on Interesting, the N One app will factor that in to aggregate what it thinks you’ll want to listen to next.

For your personalized queue to stay tied to you, you’ll have to log in with a Facebook, +, or N account. The app will automatically set the affiliated station based on your location, but you can change it if there’s another one that’s near dear to your heart.

Each time you open the app, it will default to the Now aying tab, which displays the programs playing on your personalized station. There’s also a slide-out menu from the left that offers access to your suggestions a quick link to donate (which you hopefully already do), as well as a search function, though it had tough time finding some of the other more popular serial programs, like etplace. There were also several instances where the app would just hang as it was loading something.

Apparently, the N One app also caches whatever is displayed in your feed for offline listening, but there was no indication that anything was actually downloaded, nor was there an option that allowed me to choose whether or not the app is allowed to do so using cellular data. At this point, I’d rather just stick to my tried–true method of downloading the episode of whatever programs I like listening to directly to my phone with a podcast app. 

so, the N One app doesn’t offer the feeling that you truly “own” your own radio station. I love listening to my public radio affiliate, KQED, because of the hosts their daily traffic weather reports in between segments. Nothing else conjures up a smile on my face like hearing one of  Elmore‘s “Dad jokes” on my commute to work.

ile it’s great that the N One app makes its wealth of public radio podcasts programs available for on-dem listening, it’s definitely not for everyone. This app exists to help N’s transition with the next generation of public radio listeners, but there’s still a few features it needs to implement before it truly becomes your own personalized N station.