Listenting To Radio Stations With the Music App On Your Apple Devices

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about playing radio stations in the new Music app in macOS and iOS. 

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So there used to be a section in iTunes where you could go and listen to actual radio stations. You know stations in different towns with DJ's and everything. That section is gone but you can still listen to radio stations in the new Music app. As a matter of fact it looks like you can listen to more stations than ever before.

Here I am in the Music app in macOS Catalina. So let's go to Radio and you'd think that's where you would find it. But in fact this refers more to Apple Music particularly the Beats 1 radio station which is Apple's own streaming radio station with DJ's and programs and everything. Also other types of programs that have more to do with playing a series of songs, or songs that are somehow related to each other in a stream. They're not real radio stations like the one you would listen to in your car or radio. You know with DJ's and they are local to your town and all of that.

To get to those what you need to do is Search. So you can search one of many ways. For instance, you could enter in the frequency number, for instance 102.3 seems to be a popular frequency for FM stations. So I will use that. It's going to come up with a ton of stuff. You're going to see radio stations here. You can click See All and there are a ton of radio stations. You might recognize some of the logos from your hometown, for instance. If you want to play one of these just click and it will start streaming.

Another way to go is to enter in the call letters. Like that and you'll come up with stations that fit those call letters. But you could also search for things like say your local town. When you do a search like this you're going to get various search results. You're going to get albums. You're going to get songs, playlists. You want to go down to Radio Stations here and that's where you'll see radio stations that match that keyword. Now keyword matching is not great. It seems like a lot of radio stations don't have great descriptions. So, for instance, there are a ton more radio stations from Denver that are in here that I can find if I search specifically for them. They just don't show up on a search for Denver. So, you know, I try other things like searching for Colorado and some more come up. But it really helps to search either for the specific name of the station if they go by a name or to search by their call letters.

Now you'll notice here that at the bottom it says From, From Tune In or From I Heart Radio or sometimes from Radio.com. These are the three services that Apple is using. They have agreements with these services to provide these stations. You can actually go to these services or their apps and get the stations through them. Apple Music has an agreement so you can get it using the Music App. Now this is supposed to be part of Apple Music so you'd think that you need to pay for an Apple Music subscription to get these. But I don't have an Apple Music subscription here on this account yet every station I've tried has started playing just fine. Either everybody can get it right now and maybe things will change or this is really meant to be a free part of Apple Music that everybody can get. Sometimes some of these stations don't even have a From Tune In or I Heart Radio or anything like that which makes me think that Apple is also getting some of these stations directly from their streams.

Now what's disappointing is that you can't Bookmark or Save these stations in any way. If I click on these three dots here I have Share Station and I can do Copy Link, Email that link or send that Link by a Message. So I can copy the link here but there's no way to add it to a playlist. There's no way to drag it anywhere. So if you want to go back to a station you're just going to have to search for it again. It helps to search exactly for that station.

However, if you go to Safari and you paste in that Link you'll end up at this special page at Music.Apple.com which has the logo there and it says Listen in iTunes. Which is funny but if you click on this it does, as you would expect, take you to the Music app and starts streaming that station. But the useful thing about these Safari links is that you can Bookmark them. You can create a set of bookmarks that take you to these pages. Then you're one click away from listening to the station.

Now there is a second way to listen to a streaming radio station in the Music app. That's to get the stream URL directly. So, for instance, I can go to this radio station here and they have the URL for the stream. So I can Control click on it, Copy the link, then if I go over here to the Music app I can go File, Open Stream URL, and paste it in. When I do so I can play that stream. It works just as well as the other way. The interesting thing is that now I can actually add it to a playlist. So I can create a playlist of different stations that I like to stream. 

I should also add you can ask Siri to do this. So I could tell Siri, Play radio station KBCO. You can see it starts that radio station right there.

Now this also, of course, works in iOS, either in the iPhone or the iPad.  You want to do the same thing here. You want to use the Search function and then search for the radio station. Make sure you're searching Apple Music and not your Library. It will come up here with songs and albums and such and there are the Radio Stations. You can start playing those stations the same way here in the Music App on your iPhone or iPad. You can ask Siri on your iPhone or iPad as well. It's just really tricky to ask Siri because spelling out the call letters or the frequency number for a station Siri doesn't get it right a lot of the time. So it's a lot easier to just manually search for it.

Now I'm also hearing that this could be location dependent. So I've seen just about everything here in the United States. But if you're in another country you may only see a limited subset of stations or maybe no stations at all. It probably all has to do with licensing agreements between Apple Music and I Heart Radio, Tune In, and radio.com. Or the licensing agreements inside of those three services as well.