It’s Friday afternoon, and if you’re not already slacking off at work why not put your feet up on your desk and turn on some tunes. The iheartradio app has launched on the App Store, giving you access to all of your favorite artists, local (Clear Channel) and national radio stations, artist interviews and videos, and image galleries captioned off for your entertainment. It’s been a while since I’ve checked out an iheartradio app (which is gratuitously advertised by my local radio station), but I have to say I’m impressed with just how fast the iPad app is. Radio station’ connect instantly, there’s AirPlay built in to pipe tunes and video to your Apple TV, and you can favorite stations so you can quickly access all of your favorite radio channels from a handy playlist. If you hear a song that tickles your boom-tubes, you can purchase the song from iTunes in a snap. The features only get better, and we’ll conclude our short review just past the break.

I might be old school in that I occasionally will listen to my local radio station for background music while I churn out reviews and other content here at the office, and iheartradio for the iPad gives me that must have digital connection in an area with fuzzy FM reception. Though the audio stream isn’t CD quality, the playback interface for the station you listen to is really solid. As songs play, they’ll queue up in Cover Flow fashion so you can browse through all of the tracks previously played during your listening session, and song information is updated instantly in real time. If you hear a song you don’t recognize, you can view the song lyrics for the track, and share it with your friends on Facebook or Twitter if it rocks your socks. A slideshow fills in the rest, and while it wish it was pertinent only to the current artist that’s playing, it offers fun facts and photos from a wide range of popular artists.

Also notable is the collection of videos available in the iheartradio app, giving you some ample time wasting opportunities as you check out Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded” or Slash’s “Starting Music” interview. Again, videos load just about instantly and I’m consuming live music performances faster than loading a Flash video on their actual website. For a free app, there’s a lot to enjoy if your local radio station is a part of Clear Channel Radio, and I give the latest update a big thumbs up.