Radio Gaga User Manual

What's Radio Gaga?

Radio Gaga is quite simply the best tool for recording Internet radio stations. You'll never again need you decide which of 150 disco stations to listen to, or pray that you'll catch that rare Grateful Dead song someday: just set Radio Gaga to grab what you want, leave it to do its tricks while you work or play, and be sure that you'll return to the best of the best. Radio Gaga even records multiple streams at a time, so you can fill your iTunes library with music recorded from Internet radio stations.

Radio Gaga includes a collection of more than 10,000 Internet radio stations and you can easily add your own if there are any we've missed. (We provide a way for you to tell us about any we don't already have!) Radio Gaga lets you:

• Listen to 10,000+ Internet radio stations on your Mac
• Record as many streams as you want, limited only by your bandwidth
• Schedule recordings for any time in the future
• Schedule recurring recordings (for example, every Monday and Wednesday at 6 PM)
• Record only tracks by a specific artist or with a specific name
• Export recordings directly to iTunes in compatible-with-everything MP3 format, correctly trimmed and tagged and ready for copying to your iPod
• Sort and organize your recordings in several convenient ways
• ...and much more!

Radio Gaga shares some of iTunes' characteristic look, so you'll probably understand its basic functions within seconds of launching it for the first time. But Radio Gaga has some unexpected features - in fact, it's the first program that accomplishes all of the above feats. This manual will help you enjoy them all, from the simple to the arcane.

But before we begin, you should know a few things:

• Recording is limited only by your Internet bandwidth. You say you can't record 20 streams at once? Don't blame Radio Gaga: only as much music flows as your pipes allow.
• Radio stations go on- and off-line unexpectedly, so the station you love might not be on the air when its scheduled recording time arrives. If stations are off-line, or if Radio Gaga loses connections during recordings, it will try and reconnect.
• Recordings can take up a lot of space. We know; it's tempting to record a day's worth of everything on a dozen stations of your favorite genre... but that would take around 8GB of space, or 1/12th of the average laptop's hard drive! The good news: Radio Gaga has a setting to stop recording before your disk is full, so don't worry: your other stuff is safe. (But you can always get a bigger hard drive.)

Get in there! Installing Radio Gaga

If you've gotten this far, you've already downloaded Radio Gaga from the GagaFactory web site. Radio Gaga requires at least Mac OS X 10.5 (sorry to all those who don't have Leopard or later, but this is a good reason to upgrade), and 10.5.8 or later is recommended. The program doesn't use a lot of memory or take up much disk space, but you will need a lot of hard disk space to store all the music you record. While you can listen to single Internet radio stations with just about any Internet connection, you'll want a fast pipe if you want to record lots of streams simultaneously.

Installing Radio Gaga

When you download Radio Gaga, you'll have a disk image file called Radio Gaga.dmg. Double-click this disk image, then drag the Radio Gaga application to your Applications folder.

When you first launch the Radio Gaga application, you'll see a license (you're bound by this if you use the program), then a registration screen where you must enter your name and serial number. If you want to try out the program, however, you can click Evaluate. You will be able to use Radio Gaga in evaluation mode for 15 days. During this period, you will be able to access all 10,000+ radio stations, and try out all of Radio Gaga's features.

When you serialize the program, Radio Gaga contacts Gaga Factory's servers to register and authorize the program. Radio Gaga is linked to your Mac, so if you want to use the program on a different Mac, you'll need to choose Deauthorize Radio Gaga from the Radio Gaga menu to remove the authorization for your Mac. Only then can you serialize the program on a different Mac.

The quick hello: From launch to recording in 30 seconds

So - you've survived the installation process and are ready to go. Here's the short version for those who hate reading as much as they love music.

Launch Radio Gaga to see its collection of genres:

Click on any genre badge for a list of stations of that genre. (We clicked the 50s one to satisfy our Elvis habit.)

Click on a radio station to select it and you'll see that it changes to a lighter shade of blue.

I expect you've figured this out already, but to be thorough, here's the details: click the triangular Play button (at the bottom-left of the Radio Gaga window) to listen to the radio stream live, and click the red Record button to record it to your Mac.

When you start playing a radio station, Radio Gaga's display pane at the bottom of the window shows the name of the radio station and the name of the current track.

Radio Gaga displays an icon to show that a radio station is playing, and changes the color of the radio station to red to show when it's recording. This one, for example, is doing both:

To stop playing or recording a station, click the appropriate button again.

But you want to know what you recorded, right? Click Tracks in the left column, then click the date of your recording and there it is:

You can then play these tracks whenever you like, or export them to iTunes (and, from there, to an iPod). We'll show you how later.

Next: Finding and playing radio stations »