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iTunes Radio

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Have you checked out the Radio section of iTunes lately? I did last week, and wow, what a surprise. I was beginning to think that Apple was backing off on streaming radio. At the February MacGroup meeting, one of our members came to the Genius Table for help because of the error messages that she was getting with her favorite stations. We tried it with my MacBook, and were only able to access a very small percentage of those tried. Knowing it was a problem on Apple’s end of things we finally gave up.

Last week something made me look again, and what a surprise. Not only have they added several more genre divisions, but the number of streams has increased to over 2,000. I found some great comedy channels, a bunch of International channels originating from Italy (hey, I’ve listened to this stuff since I was a tiny kid.), sports channels (including some of our locals), and of course, in with the talk channels is WJR-AM where our own Friday Guy, Calvin Carson can be heard most Saturdays.

If it has been a while since you’ve looked at iTunes Radio section, check it out. You may be pleasantly surprised. Oh, and when you find stations that you’ll want to listen to again? Create a new playlist and drag those stations into the playlist. Saves wading through those 2000+ station listings.

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  • Kathy Singer

    What I would really like to see on iTunes Radio is an ability to search by words in the station name or description. Apple’s categories are very broad. Scanning through various categories to find Spanish language stations or singer/songwriter music is somewhere between daunting and impossible. There seems to be many more stations broadcasting in French than in Spanish. How did you manage to find Italian?

    • Phyllis Evans

      I’d like to see the same thing, but at least it’s working better than ever. If you want specific language stations like Spanish, look in the International/World category. If you scan down the descriptions, most will either state the language, or the description will be in that language. That’s how I found the Italian stations.

      • Kathy Singer

        I was hoping you had a better solution, but thanks for bringing up the whole subject. I had gotten away from listening and plan to get back to it now.