I’m a person who likes to have noise in the background whenever I’m doing things — taking a shower, getting ready for the day or for bed, or while biking and running.

Even if I’m not necessarily paying 100 percent attention to what’s playing, it’s still something I need, so why not have something playing that doesn’t absolutely suck?

One day my local radio station talked about a new app, “NPR One.” As an avid listener of NPR, I was sold.

What this app does is give you an hourly news roundup, and then focuses on providing curated stories in the form of pre-recorded segments.

If you like one, then you mark it as “interesting,” and the algorithms that be will feed you more stories similar to your growing interests. The app even features a search function to track down certain types of news headlines you may want to hear more about.

The app will occasionally insert some of its longer segments into the daily routine, like their “snap judgement” stories, side projects, or pop culture happy hour.

If they don’t play automatically, you’re given a choice of tapping their icon to listen, or skipping it and going to the next news snippet.

As a journalist, I think it’s important to keep up with current news in whatever way you can, and NPR One’s hourly news roundup is great for that.

While they are a largely unbiased station, it’s hard to see them ever leaning toward the Republican party’s favor, pending some sort of major upheaval of ideology or other catastrophe.

My only knock on the app is that it doesn’t have segments from the actual radio broadcast, like my favorite, the BBC News Hour.

For the casual listener this is probably a trifling detail, but for a diehard BBC fan like myself, this is a pretty major setback. I love hearing foreign affairs read to me every day at 3 p.m. from a soothing British voice. But, as Mick Jagger once said, you can’t always get what you want.