Playing Your iTunes Radio

To tune in iTunes radio, perform the following steps:

1. Open iTunes and select the Radio source by clicking it. The Content pane will contain the list of genres available to you. The column headings will be updated to be appropriate to the content. For example, you will see Stream, Bit Rate, and Comment.
2. Click the expansion triangle for the genre in which you are interested (see Figure). iTunes will connect to the Internet to update the list of channels for the genre you selected, and the genre will expand. You will see the various channels it contains. Look at the stream name, bit rate, and comment for the channels to decide which you want to try. Usually, the comment will provide a description of the kind of music the stream contains.
3. To play a channel, select it and click Play or double-click the stream you want to hear. The channel will begin to play (this will be instantaneous if you have a fast connection to the Net, or there will be a slight delay if you use a dial-up connection). Just like when you play a song on a CD, the speaker icon will appear next to the channel to which you are listening. Also just like when you listen to a CD, information about the channel will appear in the Information window. This includes the stream name, the song currently playing, and the Web site with which the channel is associated.

You can use the Volume slider to change the volume level and the Stop button to stop playback. The Rewind and Fast Forward buttons work a little differently than you might expect. Rather than moving you in the selected stream, they instead take you to the previous or next stream, which makes sense when you think about each stream as being like a track on a CD.