Internet radio brings a wide range of digital services to anyone with a
fast internet connection. Not only can you tune into your favourite
national station, but there is a wealth of choice from broadcasters all
over the world at your disposal.
Internet radio is a revolution in broadcasting. While print has been
democratised through innumerable small press and home made publications
over the years (some of which have gone on to commercial success),
radio has always been out of reach of those unwilling to play the cat
and mouse games associated with pirate broadcasting. Now anyone can set
up their own station legally and broadcast across the world.
But how do you get these stations, and can you use them with iTunes,
arguably the best music player software? This tutorial was written for
iTunes 4.9, iTunes 5 & 6 look slightly different but everything
will
work in the same way.
iTunes' Radio menu
Clicking on "Radio" in iTunes will bring up iTunes' built in radio
playlist, containing categories with a ready chosen list of stations.
While some of them are very good, the list (below) contains mainly US
based
stations broadcasting in English.
iTunes'
Radio menu contains a selection chosen by Apple, which can't be altered
Finding stations on the
internet
A number of broadcasting services exist on the internet, and, as with
anything else, being sure you've found everything out there is always
going to be impossible.
Hopefully, your favourite station has a website, which will give
directions for listening online. Otherwise, services such as Live 365,
which is a streaming
server host, carry thousands of stations which you can listen to.
If the station says you need RealPlayer or Windows Media Player to
listen to the stream, unfortunately it won't be possible to add it to
iTunes. Both can easily be used to listen to radio, but iTunes offers
the easiest management of stations on your system. The tutorial below
may sound complicated, but should be easy enough once you've got used
to it.
Into iTunes - making your own
playlist
(this tutorial assumes you are
running iTunes on a Mac -
differences for Windows users will be explained)
1
The first thing to do is to create a new playlist in iTunes, call it
"Radio" for now. This is where
you are going to put your radio stations, as for some obscure reason,
iTunes won't let you put them in the Radio menu (daft I know)
2
Open your browser and find your
favourite online station. Hopefully it won't say "Download RealOne
Player", or "Windows Media Player" in which case you'll probably have
to download RealOne player
unless someone else knows a workaround. RealOne Player doesn't seem to
work very well on a Mac, and Windows Media Player is one version behind
on the Mac...
3
When you see the link that says "Play Now" or similar, click on it.
If it's a link that starts playing the station, stop it playing, then
hold down control and click on
it again (with a 2+ button mouse or on
Windows, click with the right button). If you have iTunes set up
properly on Windows, it will prompt you to open the stream in iTunes
anyway, in which case you can skip to 5.
4
Hold down the right button (or control
on the Mac) and copy the link location to the clipboard.
Select "Open
Stream..." from the Advanced
menu in iTunes, and paste the location into the dialog box (Apple V
on a Mac, control
V on Windows - shown below).
Press OK.
paste the
stream location into iTunes
5
Go to your library, and scroll to the station that should now be
playing. This will be marked by the "now playing" symbol of a blue
speaker. Drag this into your radio playlist (shown below).
drag the
station now playing (identified by the blue speaker symbol) into your
playlist
6
Continue finding stations and dragging them into the Radio playlist
until all your favourite stations are there. For good measure, if the
station gives a choice of bandwidths (eg 128k, 64k, 32k...), try and
put them all in, so you can use a lower or higher quality stream
depending on how the network is doing.
Next time, you only need to open iTunes and select your station from
the Radio playlist.
café ABsite's
favourite stations are on a downloadable
playlist. Right
click or control click
to save the link target to your computer, then
choose "Import..."
from the File
menu in iTunes to open
it.
