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Adding streaming radio to Apple TV

Your copy of iTunes plays streaming radio. Your iPhone can do the same with the right application—and that right application might be Pandora Radio, AOL Radio, Tuner Internet Radio, StreamItAll Radio, and allRadio. But how about the Apple TV?

It works as well—maybe. Once upon a time, one gpenston posted the Stream Internet Radio Directly on Apple TV Take 2 hint on Mac OS X Hints. And it gave me hope.

And then that hope was dashed when I couldn’t get it to work. Now that I’m spending time whipping my Apple TV into shape, I thought I’d give it another go. And this time it works. And, as the admirable gpenston claims, it works this way:

Come September: iPods

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Apple has announced a San Francisco-based special event for September. Like past September special events—where the iPod nanos and video capable iPods have made their debut—this one will surely focus on the iPod. (The invitation, with its title Let’s Rock, iPod interface, and silhouette figure makes that clear to even unsubtle folks like me.)

And it comes as no surprise because in Apple’s eyes, September means the holidays are a scant Autumn away. That can only mean that it’s time to issue the latest batch of tempting portable media players. And, in turn, that can only mean that it’s time for us iPod watchers to don our speculation hats and ponder what September 9 might bring.

The new nano

September 2005 brought the original, scratchable iPod nano. 2006 introduced the tougher aluminum 2G nano. And 2007 saw the birth of the ittier-bittier aluminum, video-capable iPod nano we enjoy today. The iPod nano is Apple’s most popular iPod—not too expensive, easily slipped into a stocking, attractive, and capable as hell. And because it is, the company can’t seem to leave the thing alone.

Whipping the Apple TV into shape

Those who follow this space and the words that fill it know that I have a love/hate relationship with my Apple TV. I love it because it’s just such a clever and convenient way to deliver iTunes Store purchases and media I’ve obtained in other ways to my TV and AV system. I hate it because it’s far-too-prone to doing nothing in an impudent sort of way as I impotently mash the Apple Remote’s controls over and over again.

The latter was happening often enough that I’ve spent more time with my DVD library of late rather than tussling with the Apple TV. But what a waste of cool technology!

So with that in mind, I decided that it was time to give it another go by setting up as Apple TV-friendly a system as I could in the hope that we could let bygones be bygones and rekindle our past love. And so I did this:

Obtaining free GarageBand sounds

I like nearly all of Apple’s $99 Jam Pack add-on sound libraries for GarageBand (Voices doesn’t do a lot for me), but I also like free. And when I think free and GarageBand I think SoundFonts, E-mu Systems’ sampled sound file format—a software instrument format supported by GarageBand.

Here’s how to obtain and install SoundFonts:

1. Google “soundfont” to find one of the many sites that offer free SoundFonts—HammerSound is a good place to start.

Record any sounds

Many fleeting sounds that play on your Mac are worth preserving. Content streaming over the Internet-be it Internet radio, online videos, or an iChat phone call-or even the audio coming from a concert DVD you’re watching can have lasting value, but such content is not always easy to capture. Maybe you’re making a podcast and would like to include a Skype interview (recorded with permission, of course), or you want to take content from your favorite streaming radio station with you on your iPod. With the help of the right software, you can record and edit audio files and add them to iTunes for future use.

Capture Bits and Bytes

First, you’ll need software to record audio. There are two excellent Mac programs that can do this: Rogue Amoeba Software’s $32 Audio Hijack Pro 2.8.1, and Ambrosia Software’s $69 WireTap Studio 1.0.6 (version 1.0.1, ). Both allow you to capture audio coming from any program-while excluding sound from other applications or the system-and save it in the format you want. WireTap Studio costs twice as much as Audio Hijack Pro, but it comes with powerful audio editing tools; Audio Hijack Pro requires a separate editing tool, such as Rogue Amoeba Software’s Fission (discussed later).

When recording any online audio, you should consider copyright restrictions. While recording and saving audio such as that from radio programs may be legal according to the U.S. Copyright act’s “fair use” doctrine, you may not have the right to save-and especially to share with others-certain recordings, such as a single from a band’s Web site, for example.

Watching the Olympics on your Mac

As you may have heard, there’s a smallish sporting event going on in China. Despite its humbleness, people seem to be interested in the thing. Some of them use Macs. And some of those Mac users are more that a little peeved that NBC seems unwilling to provide Olympics videos that are compatible with their computers. Such sentiment is nicely distilled by reader Chuck, who writes:

Am I correct is observing that Olympics-related downloads at NBC.com are PC-only? If so, are they nuts?

While I can’t speak directly to NBC’s sanity, given its extended pout over providing content to the iTunes Store, I think we can safely say that while not insane, the people in charge of Internet content certainly bear watching. But questions of corporate lunacy aside, there’s this:

Yes, when you attempt to download videos from NBC’s site, you’ll see this message:

Imagining a new iTunes

I’d like to take the next couple of minutes to reach out across this vast expanse between us and solicit your help. It’s like this:

Earlier this week I penned Don’t Be a Player Hater, a reply to PC World’s 11 Things We Hate About iTunes. The reaction to both articles in our forums was interesting. Mixed in among the predictable Windows taunts there were a couple of comments along the lines of “Many of the PC World gripes were admittedly picayune, but perhaps it is time to take a look at redoing iTunes.”

And I believe there’s some truth in this. iTunes started out as the big brother to Casady & Green’s SoundJam MP—a basic audio player that could rip your CDs. iTunes today does this as well as catalogs your music, videos, podcasts, and iPhone applications; plays all these media types (save applications); creates playlists; streams Internet radio; burns CDs and DVDs; pops up a visualizer you can space out to; synchronizes music and data to iPods, iPhones, and Apple TVs; streams content to Apple TVs; converts media from one format to another; acts as a front-end for the iTunes Store; manages movie rentals; and edits ringtones.

Don’t be a player hater

Like the rest of us, our friends a few cubicles down at PC World get fed up to the point where the dam of their frustration eventually bursts. Such was the case when PC World posted its 11 Things We Hate About iTunes, along with an equally ire-filled companion piece Is Apple iTunes the new AOL? (Our short answer: No. No, it isn’t. Our longer answer: The new AOL? Really?)

PC World, we feel your pain. We at Macworld have been dealing with Apple issues since the dinosaurs walked the earth and have learned to deal with things with a measure of patience and understanding. With that in mind, allow me to attempt to take some of the sting out of those 11 hateful things.

1. Wildly Inefficient Updates

What PC World Hates: “Forcing us to download and reinstall the entire program for every little update. And bundling QuickTime, too, whether it’s new or not.”

Driving iTunes Daffy

Three recent events have put me in the Apple-suggesting mood.

The first is that on Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York said that it’s perfectly okay with it if consumers stored recorded television programming on remote servers rather than on a hard drive packed inside their home digital video recorder. Think TiVo. Think storage in the cloud rather than on that TiVo’s hard drive. Think expandable storage. Think Video-on-Demand by another name. Think how much the cable companies love the idea and how thoroughly the networks loath it. You’ve got the idea.

The second is last night’s encounter with my Apple TV. It’s 20 minutes before dinner, my daughter had been good as gold all day, and she sweetly asks “Dada, could we watch a new Daffy Duck?”

iTunes' Start and Stop Times

A reader recently wrote in with a problem he was having with a rebuilt iTunes library. The gist is that although all the music played, several of the songs ended before they were supposed to and then the next tune in the playlist began playing immediately afterwards.

I suggested that he select one of these tunes, press Command-I to bring up the Info window, click the Options tab, and make sure that the Stop Time option was unchecked. Sure enough, it was checked for each of the songs he’d had difficulties with. Unchecking the option did the trick.

In his reply he wrote “Never knew what that was. I turned it off, and problem solved.” This leads me to believe that those people who take advantage of the Start and Stop time options are few and far between. And why not? What possible good could these settings do?