Radio Gaga User Manual

Finding and playing radio stations

There! The world of Internet radio is now yours to capture and enjoy at leisure. But that's only a glimpse of what Radio Gaga does: read on for full mastery.

First, choose a genre

As we said before, when you launch Radio Gaga you see a page full of "genres" - that is, types of stations - displayed as "badges".

But click this icon in the upper-left corner...

...and you see those genres in iTunes' familiar "Cover Flow" format.

You can scroll through the genres by pressing the right- or left-arrow keys, or you can click one of them to bring it to the center of the display. If you know which genre you want, find it quickly by typing its name in the search box in the upper-right corner.

But let's get back to the Badge view. Under each genre badge is the genre's name and the number of stations of that genre.

Does that mean there are actually 1129 different Dance stations out there? Sadly, no. The actual number is different for two reasons:

• Many stations broadcast in multiple audio qualities, or "bit rates". (Lower bit rates such as 56kbps are best if you don't have a good Internet connection, although sound quality suffers.) The same audio stream at three different bit rates are counted as three stations.
• Radio Gaga re-counts the number of stations in a genre only after you click on its genre badge. So in this case, there were 1129 stations available the last time we looked in the Dance genre: since then some may have launched or gone off the air. These radio stations come and go according to reasons we cannot fathom (perhaps the people who run them simply turn off their computers).

Second, choose your station

Click on a genre badge and you'll see a page full of station buttons.

But this is only the first page! To see more, either:

• Click any station button, then hold down the right-arrow key on your keyboard. This will highlight each station, one at a time, then move to the next page. Or:
• Click the right arrow at the bottom of the screen (as if turning the pages of an e-book).

Tip: If you want to see more stations on a page, just resize the Radio Gaga window by dragging the bottom right corner of the window. You can make it small enough so it only shows two stations, or big enough to show... well, as many as can fit on your Mac's monitor.

For a faster (but less pretty) way to see all the stations in a genre, click the "list view" button at the top of the window:

In either case, the "Sort by" popup menu lets you re-order them as you like.

You can quickly find any particular station if you know its name: just click in the search box in the upper-right corner and type the station's name and everything else will fall away, leaving only the one you want.

"But wait," you say. "I wanted a specific NPR station, but Radio Gaga gave me five!" Ah (I reply), that's because:

• More than one station had "NPR" as part of its name; and
• This sort of search looks at stations' genres as well as their names. So here, for example, WNIJ Radio is classified as an NPR station, so our search found it even though "NPR" isn't part of its name. This is because it plays some NPR programming. As you can probably notice, the "Genre" info isn't standardized; radio stations can put whatever they like there.

Get a bit more specific (by typing "NPR news", for example) and you'll narrow the field further until you get the one you want.

One last trick for finding stations. See that little plus sign next to the search box? Click it, and you can narrow your search based on a station's bit rate or how Radio Gaga users have rated the station. You can even add criteria to make searches using any combination of these three elements. (That way, you can always make your favorite stations pop out!)

Tip: When you rate a radio station, Radio Gaga sends your rating information anonymously to a secret server that records all users' ratings. So you'll be able to look for stations that other people think are cool. But make sure you contribute to the swarm: rate your favorite stations (or the ones you don't like) by clicking a number of stars in the Rating column next to a station's name, or on the station's button when you're in button view.

Here, we've searched for Ambient stations with "chill" in their names and that deliver music at 128 kbps or better. To remove a criterion, click the minus-sign button next to it.

If you know a station's URL: the shortcut

Do you already know your favorite station's URL, and don't want to go through all that? Lucky you - with Radio Gaga you can just enter the URL and start listening. Under the File menu, choose Add New Radio, and you'll get a dialog that looks like this:

If you check "Submit to Radio Gaga team", we'll check it out and add it to our lists if it's valid and we don't have it already. Thanks in advance!

If you need to change any information for a radio station you added, click it and select Edit Radio from the Advanced menu.

If you find a radio station in iTunes that you want to add to Radio Gaga, there's a simple way to do so. Just select the radio station in the iTunes list, then drag it to a radio list in Radio Gaga. You can drag it onto a radio list icon in the program's sidebar, or you can drag it to the list itself, if you've already clicked a radio list. (But we haven't yet discussed radio lists; you'll see that later in Organizing your audio library.)

Third, grab some tunes!

So now you've found the station you want. There are four ways to play it:

• Double-click it;
• Click it once, then hit the space bar;
• Click it once, then click the Play button (with a triangle on it) in the bottom-left corner of the Radio Gaga window;
• Press the Control key (or click your right mouse button) while clicking the station, then select Play from the popup menu (in list view only).

While tracks are playing you can control them using the buttons under the left column.

They are:

• Play, the big button with the triangle. While a station plays, this turns into a Stop button; while a recorded track plays, it turns into a Pause button.
• Record, the big button with the red dot. It also turns into a Stop button while recording.
• Volume slider, underneath the buttons, controls how loud the sound is played.

After you've collected some tracks, you play them in exactly the same way as you play a station. However, you have three extra controls:

• Previous track, the button with the leftward-pointing double arrow on it.
• Next track, the button with the rightward-pointing double arrow on it.
• Repeat playlist, the small button with two small arrows chasing each other. With this depressed, all tracks on a playlist will be played, and then the entire list will start over again.

(The plus-sign and minus-sign buttons are there to add and remove playlists and folders: see the section titled "Squirrelling tracks away into folders and playlists" for details.)

But there are three other ways to control what you hear. First, you can use the menu items in the Controls menu:

Second, you can use the keyboard shortcuts shown on that menu to control playback. To skip to the next track, for example, you'd hold down the Command key and press the right-arrow key.

Third, you can minimize Radio Gaga's main screen to a small "mini-player" version by selecting Show Remote Control under the Window menu (or pressing Command-2). You can also toggle this player by clicking the green button in the window's title bar.

(To return to Radio Gaga's full screen, either click the small green button on the Remote Control's left side, select Show Main Window under the Window menu, or press Command-1.)

While a station is playing, its name and the current track's name appear at the bottom of the screen.

To stop playing a station:

• Press the space bar;
• Double click the station;
• Click the Stop button in the bottom-left corner of the Radio Gaga window; or
• Hold down your keyboard's Control key while clicking the station, then select Stop from the popup menu (in list view only).

You'll find that, depending on the locations of the radio stations you try and the time of day, that some of them will be offline when you try to listen to them. If a station's not available, Radio Gaga will tell you so. No big deal; there are hundreds of others in each genre for you to choose from.

Want to explore another genre?

So now you're listening to your favorite stream - or have rejected them all and changed your mind - and want to switch to another genre. Click the "Show all genres" button and you'll return to the Internet's vast bounty.

If you want to be able to access stations in several genres at once, you can do so by putting them in a playlist first. See the section "Squirrelling away your stuff into folders and playlists" for details.

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