Tech Qs?: Listening To Radio 2's Music Channels

...through iTunes. That's the rest of today's topic, but those long subject headings start looking funny on the page. But it is indeed the subject for this week's Tech Q's? column. (For previous editions, just click on that link and scroll down.)

For people who don't use iTunes and don't want to, no problem, as Peter Cook, our resident Tech Doc will explain. But if you are one of the many who like listening to music this way, today's column explains how you can customize your experience of listening to those four CBC music channels in your own iHome.

Over to you, Peter:

"In Sept 2008 CBC Radio 2 introduced four new internet radio services which we've been calling "Music Channels". With these services you can listen 24/7 to one of four genre-specific stations: Classical, Jazz, Canadian Songwriters and Canadian Composers.

You can read more about this service and you can use the CBC Radio 2 Channel Player to listen to the streams on the Music Channels page. One advantage of using our player is that you see lots of information about what music is currently playing. And we have many more features planned for this player in the future.

But a lot of people have iTunes at the centre of their music world so today we're going to look at how to listen to the Music Channels using iTunes. And I'll show you an easy way to return to our channels without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Start up iTunes. You may not have noticed it before but near the top on the left is an icon labelled "Radio". Click on the Radio icon and you'll see a long list of genres. There's a ton of stuff out there!

To find the CBC offerings you'll need to look inside the appropriate genres. Click on the small triangle beside Classical. The list expands to show all the stations sorted alphabetically. A short way down the list you'll find CBC Canadian Composers and then CBC Classical.

You can find the other CBC Channels by looking inside other genres. CBC Jazz is inside (no surprise here) the Jazz genre. CBC Canadian Songwriter is inside the Pop genre. There's a pdf file here with pretty pictures to illustrate what I've just described.

You probably know that you can create playlists to organize the music you have in your iTunes library. What most people don't know is that you can put internet Radio stations in your playlist as well.

Go to the File menu and select New Playlist. You might name it "CBC Radio 2 Channels" or whatever you like. Now find each of the radio channels as described above. (Here's a tip. If you are already listening to one of the channels but you no longer see it listed just select the "View" menu and from it "Show Current Song". Bingo.)

Now you can click on the name of the channel and drag it into your newly created playlist. Go ahead and put your favourite CBC Music Channels in that playlist. From now on, when you want to return to, say, CBC Classical, you only need to select your CBC Radio 2 Channels playlist and then double-click on the CBC Classical name inside your playlist."