Playing Around with Internet Audio

You can do a couple other things with Internet audio using iTunes. If you want iTunes to be used to play Internet audio by default, open the Preferences dialog box (Ctrl+, on Windows computers or „+, on Macs). Open the General pane. Then check the Use iTunes as the Default Player for Audio Files check box (Windows) or click the Set button (Mac). When your browser hits an audio file that iTunes supports, iTunes should play it.
You can also play audio streams for which you have a URL within iTunes. To do this, use the following steps:

1. Find the URL pointing to the stream to which you want to listen. Hopefully, you can copy the URL from the Address bar of the Web browser because that is a lot easier than trying to remember the URL or writing it down and then typing it in.
2. Choose Advanced, Open Stream. The Open Stream dialog box will appear.
3. Paste in or type the URL in the URL field.
4. Click OK. The stream will play.

Configuring iTunes for a Slow Internet Connection

If you use a slow Internet connection, such as a dial-up account, traffic on the Internet can cause the stream of music to slow or even stop, resulting in pauses in the music, even if you choose a lower bit-rate channel, such as 32Kbps. If this is a problem for you, perform the following steps:

1. Choose Edit, Preferences (Windows) or iTunes, Preferences (Mac). The Preferences dialog box will appear.
2. Click the Advanced tab (Windows) or the Advanced icon (Mac). The Advanced pane will appear (see Figure).
3. On the Streaming Buffer Size dropdown list, choose Large. This increases the amount of buffer space used to store a stream before it actually starts to play.
4. Click OK. The dialog box will close.

Hopefully, this will eliminate any pauses in the streams to which you like to listen. If not, choose a different stream or one with a lower bit rate.

Refreshing Your Radio

When you choose the Radio source, the Action button becomes the Refresh button. When you click this, all the genres are refreshed with the latest content. If you leave the Radio source selected for a long time, you might want to click the Refresh button once in a while to see if new channels become available. (Each time you select the Radio source, it is refreshed, so you don’t need to click the Refresh button if you have recently selected the Radio source.)

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.

Controlling iTunes from the Mac’s Dock

The iTunes icon on the Mac OS X enables you to control iTunes when it is in the background, when its window is minimized, or when the application is hidden. When you Ctrl-click the iTunes Dock icon (or right-click if you have a two-button mouse), the iTunes menu will appear (see Figure). At the top of this menu, you will see information about the song currently playing (the text is grayed out if iTunes is paused). You control iTunes by choosing a command on this menu. For example, you can pause the music by choosing Pause. After you choose a command, the menu will disappear, and you can get back to what you were doing.

Controlling iTunes from the Windows System Tray

When iTunes is running on a Windows machine, an iTunes icon is displayed in the System Tray. Right-click this icon and you will see an iTunes menu (see Figure). At the top of the menu, you will see information about the song that is playing (if iTunes is paused, this text will be grayed out). You can use the commands on this menu just as you can from within iTunes itself. For example, you can skip to the next song by choosing Next Song. After you choose a command, you can move off the menu and it will disappear. This is a handy way to control iTunes without having to make its window active or even show it.
If you don’t want the iTunes icon to appear in the System Tray for some reason, you can remove it. Open the iTunes Preferences dialog box (Ctrl+,), click the Advanced tab, uncheck the Show iTunes Icon in System Tray check box, and click OK. The icon will no longer appear in your System Tray.