You’ll discover hundreds of radio stations from around the globe covering a number of different categories to choose from: rap, rock, ambient, electronic, and reggae to name just a few. These are called ‘currents’as they are digital transmissions sent to your machine over the Internet.
iTunes radio is easy
1. To take a look at what’s available, simply click on the Radio button in iTunes Font menu bar to the left of the iTunes interface. This takes you to a list of categories, each with a right-facing arrow on the left side of the category description. To explore a category, simply click on the arrow next to its description.
Each available radio station provides its name, a brief description of the type of music the program plays, and information about the bit rate of the stream. Higher bitrates mean that a channel is transmitted over the Internet with better quality than lower bitrate streams.
They also require more bandwidth, so if you’re using a dial-up modem to connect to the Internet, you’ll get a better experience if you choose low bitrate streams. If you are accessing the channels using broadband, you don’t need to worry.
2. Apple updates the radio channels it makes available through iTunes from time to time. If you want to make sure your channel list is up to date, you just need to update the list. To do this, select ‘Radio’ in the menu, and then click the ‘To update’ button located in the upper right corner of iTunes. The software will show you a short message, while interrogating Apple’s servers in the large window at the top of the browser, which displays a black Apple logo. After completing this process, your list will be up to date.
3. Browsing through the hundreds of channels Apple offers can be a chore, but just like any other content in iTunes, you can create playlists containing your favorite shows. All you need to do is create and name a new playlist, and drag and drop your collection of handpicked radio channels onto the playlist you’ve created. All radio channels are identified by radio icons to the left of their names. It’s a series of four curved lines tapering to a point, and to some imaginations it looks a bit like a tree.
Adding supported channels
1. First of all, you need the URL of the radio broadcast. This is not always the same URL as the channel’s website, but will usually be included within the link to the stream. Since these sometimes direct radio listeners to a third-party ISP that handles the radio stream, the easiest way to identify the URL is iTunes itself.
2. If you managed to find the correct URL for the stream, you just need to navigate to the ‘Advanced’ Dropdown menu. select it and choose ‘open current’ in the menu that appears. After a few moments, the radio show should start in iTunes and be visible in your library list. If you like what you’re hearing, just drag and drop the stream description from your library into your own personal radio playlist, since you can’t add it to the iTunes radio directory. Fortunately, iTunes automatically adds the radio station to your library, so you can listen to it in the future, but it’s even better if you add it to your personal radio playlist, since it’ll be easier to find there.
3. If you can’t find, or aren’t sure about the URL of the streams, just launch the channel you found and it will start playing in iTunes. Now navigate to your library listing, find the radio icon, and check that it matches your new channel name. if so, all you need to do now is drag and drop it into your personal playlist, so you can access it in iTunes in the future.
iTunes and the radio star
To expand the available list of radio shows, you must enable iTunes to play Internet radio shows that you find using your browser. To do this, you need to launch iTunes and navigate to ‘Preferences’ in the iTunes dropdown menu. A screen will appear showing a number of tabbed options, select ‘Advanced’.
The menu is divided into three areas. The settings you need to apply are about halfway through. Is named ‘Use iTunes to play music on the Internet’ and you will see a ‘Place’ button to the right of your name. Click this and iTunes will be set to play music streams from the Internet by default.
In the future, when you click a link to an online radio channel, your browser will automatically launch iTunes to play the show. This also means that when you come across an iTunes-compatible channel, you’ll know it.
easy but incomplete
What about radio stations that aren’t listed on iTunes?
Apple’s media player can handle any format that QuickTime supports, but the fact is that many online radio channels choose the incompatible formats Windows Media Player or Real Player.
It’s incredibly frustrating that these broadcasters don’t choose to implement true cross-platform streaming support. The BBC said last year that the demand to add such support was not enough to justify the investment. If you’re an iTunes warrior with an iPod, you should write to the stations and demand parity. Or get a DAB radio.
It’s also disappointing because the sad truth is that you can’t easily access these channels through iTunes. Of course, it’s possible to record them using software that can convert the shows to an iPod-compatible format, but that might not seem worth the effort.
thousands of channels
If you want access to more channels than iTunes supports, Griffin Technology’s ‘Shark’ radio is the perfect partner. The device is compatible with both Mac and PC and can record any AM or FM radio broadcast in real time. It is programmable and allows you to pause a show and return to it later (time shift) and transfer any recorded broadcast to iTunes and an iPod.
The company will soon send your TuneCenter iPod dock. This remote-controlled dock connects to a TV or stereo system, displays what’s playing on the TV, and has built-in WiFi connectivity. That last feature means the dock will happily access thousands of pre-programmed Internet radio channels over your wireless connection, which you can navigate through on the TV screen with the remote control.
