 |
||||||||
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
To see all the tracks you've recorded, click on Tracks in the left column.
This window has controls that you'll probably recognize from other programs - here's a quick rundown to refresh your memory.
The "Sort by" popup menu lets you sort tracks in many ways:
...or, just click at the top of a column to sort your tracks by that column's information. (Here, we've sorted by Genre.) Click again to sort in reverse order.
You can also move columns around: just click on a column's header ("Duration" in this case") and drag it where you want it to go.
As with stations, you can find a particular track quickly if you know its name, by typing it in the search box in the window's upper-right corner.
To delete a track, click it and then either press Delete while holding down the Command key, or select Delete from the Edit menu.
Finally, Radio Gaga has a neat trick for combining multiple tracks into one - a nice feature if you want to save a mixtape-like sequence as a single file. First, highlight the tracks you want by clicking them: press the Command key while clicking to highlight multiple tracks, or the Shift key to highlight several that sit next to each other in the list. Then, select Merge Tracks from the Advanced menu. You'll see a warning like this:
Note that you cannot merge tracks that come from different radio stations, because they are likely to be in different formats (especially different bit rates.)
All clear? Now let's move on to the fun stuff.
Having a big list of tracks and stations is good; making playlists from them is better; having a playlist ready for every occasion is best.
Radio Gaga creates a few handy playlists automatically, to wit:
You'll see all these automatic playlists in the left column.
But Radio Gaga also lets you create your own and gather them into folders. Controls to do so are under the File menu:
...and also appear when you click the plus-sign button at the bottom of the left column, like so:
To put together a list of your favorite radio stations, select "New Radio List". The result is an entry named "untitled radios list" under RADIOS in the left column. To change its name to something more useful, double-click on it and type the name you want.
You can group these station playlists into folders. First, create the folder by selecting "New Radio Folder" from the File menu or the plus-sign menu. Name it whatever you like. Then, click and drag station playlists on top of it. Simple! Here, we're adding "Paul's dance stations" to the folder "Booty-bumpin' dance stations", where it joins "Tanya's dance stations".
You create track playlists and track folders in the same way. Here, we've put together some playlists for a party that's coming up:
To delete anything - a radio or track playlist, or a radio or track folder - select it and click the minus-sign button at the bottom of the left column.
You know that your recordings are saved as files - MP3 files, to be precise. You know that those files take up space on your hard drive. But where, exactly, are those files? By default, Radio Gaga places them in a folder named "Radio Gaga" inside your Music folder. You can change that at any time by going to the Preferences selection under the Radio Gaga menu, and then clicking on Advanced. You may want to do this, in fact, if you are planning to record a lot of stuff, and don't have a lot of space on your startup disk. You can select a location on, say, an external hard disk and record for a lot longer.
But usually you won't be touching the audio files themselves: instead, you'll organize them from within Radio Gaga itself. There you can change a track's name, artist, genre, or rating. It's a three-step trick:
Now, you could use Radio Gaga as your only music program forever - and quite happily, if we say so ourselves. But there's one thing that iTunes does that Radio Gaga doesn't: It manages tracks on iPods directly. For that reason alone, you probably want to export tracks to iTunes. That's easy to do in Radio Gaga: just highlight the track (or tracks) you want to export and click the "Send to iTunes" button in the bottom right. You'll see a notice that the tracks are being exported, and a few seconds later, it's all done. (Exported tracks appear in an iTunes playlist named, surprisingly enough, "Radio Gaga".)
Once your tracks are in iTunes, see documentation for that program to transfer them to your iPod or burn them to CDs.
« Previous: Recording tracks | Next: The other stuff »
