Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now.
On today's episode let's take a look at iTunes Radio.
iTunes Radio is a new service from Apple.
It is available on your Mac, some PC's.
It is on iOS devices running iOS 7 and even on Apple TV's running the latest version 6.0
of the operating system.
iTunes Radio is a streaming music service.
The way it works is you give it a song or an artist or a genre and it will play music
related to that song, artist, or genre.
It may not necessarily play the song or artist that you specified but it will play music
that kind of sounds like it and it may actually then play that artist from time to time.
It works very similar, as a matter of fact pretty much exactly the same, to services
as Pandora and Last FM that have been around for a while.
So when you first upgrade to iTunes 11.1 on your Mac you will be faced with something
like this where it tells you iTunes radio is now available on your Mac and you can press
the start listening button.
Once you go in there it will give you some featured stations that are suggested and you
can also add a station here below.
So let's start by adding our own station.
Click that button there and type any artist that you want in there.
So type that and it will give me some suggestions down here of specific songs that I may like
or I can just choose the artist overall here.
It will create that radio station here and then it will start playing music from it.
You can see it streaming there.
In this case it is going to play a song by the Beatles right off the bat.
But the next one may not be.
What this is basically doing is playing my own personal radio station.
Nobody else is hearing these songs at the same time as I am.
It is just streaming from Apple to my Mac and playing this.
Then when this song is done it will play another song.
I will see a history build up here.
I can actually skip some songs.
I'm going to skip this song here and you can see it will play another one.
So I've got a new song playing here and I've got a history of the songs I recently heard
right here.
Now there are various other controls.
For instance I can go back up to radio here by clicking the X button there and you can
see there is the station and it is still playing but I can jump to another station.
I can also add another station here.
It even lets me turn whether or not you can hear explicit lyrics on or off which is good
if you are listening in the car with your kids.
That brings up the subject of listening to iTunes Radio on an iOS device.
On your iPhone or iPad or your iPod Touch, as long as you have iOS 7 you can go into
the music app.
There is no special app for iTunes Radio.
It is just inside the music app.
You can see there along the bottom you've got Radio.
Tap that and you can see those featured stations and your station.
If you are using an iCloud account it's going to sync your station between all your devices.
So if you have set up a station on one you should see it on the other.
You can tap on a station there and it will begin playing the music from there as you
can see.
Now the cool thing about iTunes Radio is you don't stop when you just create the station
by naming a song or an artist.
You can actually fine tune the station.
For instance, here in iOS if I tap the star button you can see that I have some options.
I can hit play more like this or never play this song.
These will fine tune the station to get it more that I want.
So if you choose an artist but say they have songs over a wide range of genres you can
kind of basically use these two buttons.
On Pandora it was thumbs up and thumbs down.
It is the same thing here where you are fine tuning the station so you hear more of the
songs that you want.
Now iTunes Match is free but there is advertising in it.
Every few songs or so an ad will play.
But you can get rid of the ads by simply being a subscriber to iTunes Match.
iTunes Match is a $25 a year service where you can upload all of your music to Apple's
Cloud servers and then access them from any of your devices.
So as a bonus for iTunes Match users they also get ads removed from iTunes Radio.
Now note that iTunes Radio is very new and there is going to be, I'm sure, some changes
in the next few weeks and months as the system matures.
For one thing the iTunes Radio interface in iTunes on the Mac isn't quite as robust as
the one in iOS but we can expect maybe when Mavericks comes out later this year that iTunes
Radio there will have all the features that iOS has.
Also there is a new client for Apple TV that allows you to access iTunes Radio there as
well.
Now keep in mind this is streaming music service so it is streaming over the internet.
So you need some sort of internet connection.
A typical WiFi connection at home or at work should be fine for streaming music like this.
But of course if you are mobile then it is going to be more difficult.
As a matter of fact iTunes is going to warn you if you try to use it the first time over
a connection through your mobile carrier.
People have been using other services over a mobile carrier for a long time.
I have and it really doesn't effect the band width that much.
So it is something you want to monitor if you have a very restricted band width package.
So there is a quick look at iTunes Radio.
Since it is free and easy to try whether you are on a Mac, Apple TV or using an iOS device
just give it a go.
Create a few stations though, not just one.
No one station is going to fit all the different types of music you like.
It is better maybe to create a station that is specific to a mood or an activity and create
a set of them so you can pick and choose between iTunes radio stations.
Hope you found this useful.
Until next time this is Gary
with MacMost Now.