Stream Radio Stations In iTunes

You can stream your favorite radio stations from around the world in iTunes. You can use the list of stations in iTunes, or grab the URL from your station's website and create a stream. You can then save streams to a playlist to access them easily.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: You may know that you can stream radio stations from iTunes on your Mac. Now I'm not talking about Apple's radio stations which are a mix of different music and Apple music and things like that. I'm talking about actual radio stations. Ones that put their stream online.
Pretty much all college radio stations do this and a lot of pro radio stations do it as well. You can find these, of course, by going to iTunes and clicking on the selection of the type of media you are looking at. Going to Edit, Menu, turning on Internet Radio and clicking Done.
Now you've got Internet Radio as an option here. Select Internet Radio and you've got lists of tons of different radio stations.
So if you want to find one you just look at it and look at all the different ones from around the world and select one. 
But what if the one you want isn't here because there are so many of them they can't all be listed. Well, it's pretty easy to actually add any station as long as it has a stream.
So to get to a specific station the first thing you want to do is go to the website for that station. If they've got a stream they are going to list it somewhere on their website. Sometimes they'll list it as a streaming URL here or maybe a bunch of them in different formats. Sometimes they'll just have a listen now button.
In this case I click on the listen now button and sure enough it goes to an address that's a stream. You can see it's not even a domain in here. It's actually an IP address and it has a .m3u extension. That means it's a streaming audio. It's actually going to play for me now inside of Safari and I can listen to it there. 
But I don't want to have Safari doing this. I want to do this in iTunes. So I'm going to select and copy the URL there. Then I'm going to go back to iTunes and under iTunes I'm going to go to File and Open Stream and I'm going to paste in that URL and hit OK. It's going to start streaming from that location. 
Now I don't want to have to do that every time I want to listen to this radio station. I may have others that I listen to too. I'm going to Control click on it here and see that I can Add to Playlists. I'm going to create a new playlist called Radio Stations and you can see, in this playlist, I've got this one right here and I can go ahead and add more to it if I want. Add to that radio station playlist. I can also go to get info here and it will give me info about it. I can even drag and drop album artwork there if I want to be able to more clearly see what it is I'm listening to when I look at that playlist.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Stream Radio Stations In iTunes”

Rick Calicura

8 years ago

I have tried to add stations such as WBBM or WQXR, but they take me to a "Player" instead of an IP address. How can I get that kind of a station into the Playlist you have described???

Gary Rosenzweig

Rick: You need to look on the site for a .m3u stream or some other format of stream. You need that direct link. If you can't find it, maybe try to contact them and ask. Of course, it could be that they just don't offer it.

Bob Smailes

Hi Gary,
Nice tip. Can you do the same on an iplayer / ipad?

Bob: I don't think so. No easy path to do that as the Music app doesn't seem to support this function of the Mac iTunes app. However you can certainly listen to those streams in Safari, and there are a variety of apps in the iOS App Store that support streaming radio.

Keith Kemp

Hi Gary,
Internet Radio is grayed out in iTunes so I can't select it. I am running iTunes 12.5.3.17 and MacOS 10.12.1
Thanks!

Keith: Can't think of any reason that it would be unselectable in the checklist. Are you connected to the net?

Comments Closed.

Stream Radio Stations In iTunes

Comments: 6 Responses to “Stream Radio Stations In iTunes”

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