Stream live radio with AOL Radio

Do you wish that you had an application on your Mac that would allow you to listen to a local radio station or elsewhere?  In addition, what if that application allowed you to avoid accessing the radio station’s website to play your desired station?  Don’t fret, fellow reader, because with AOL Radio, you can do just that.  This sleek application allows you stream live radio feeds on your computer and you can choose from a variety of stations to listen to.

AOL Radio’s interface couldn’t have been easier to figure out.  When you open up the application, you have a slew of genres to choose from, including blues, comedy, and even international music.  Once you have a genre that you’re in the mood to listen to, simply double-click the genre and a new list appears.  This list contains all the radio stations that are associated with the genre.  To listen to a station, double-click and AOL Radio will instantly buffer the radio feed through your Internet connection and begin playing your desired station.

Besides the easy interface, there are other reasons why AOL Radio is a great application.  One is that you can listen to a radio station outside of your location.  For example, the lite rock radio station in NYC is Fresh 102.7 FM.  With AOL Radio, you can listen to that specific station whether you’re in Florida or Japan.  Another reason why I enjoy AOL Radio is that it offers commercial-free music as well.  AOL Radio offers users the ability to listen to their commercial-free stations around the clock.  So whether you want to listen to non-stop alternative music or non-stop Cuban music, AOL Radio offers those choices.  AOL Radio also works like a car radio, in that you can program your favorite station to the number dial so that you can avoid searching for your station.  Another appealing feature of AOL Radio is that you can minimize the genre list so that your radio looks like the iTunes mini player.  This is an advantage, especially if you like windows to be small and you want to conserve space on your desktop.

Although the previous features make AOL Radio a great Internet radio client, these next two perhaps made me enjoy the application even more.  One was that as each new song plays, an opaque windows fades in showing the album artwork (if available) as well as the song name and the artist and then fades out.  This is a nice add-on, especially because it only shows up for a brief time and in case you have your player minimized in your dock, AOL Radio will still tell you which song you’re listening to.  Finally, this is perhaps the greatest feature on AOL Radio.  While you’re listening to a song with your radio player visible, you can click on the artist, the song, or the album and a drop-down menu will appear.  The menu will ask you if you want to look for the artist, song, or album on either iTunes or AOL Music.  I think this is great because if you happen to enjoy a new song that you’ve never heard, you have the ability to browse for that song on iTunes.

To wrap up, AOL Radio is currently a free application and it’s a beta version.  Additionally, AOL Radio doesn’t stream EVERY radio station in the US; it only streams radio stations associated with AOL Radio or CBS Radio.  Also remember that in order to listen to the radio on this application, you need a fully functioning Internet connection.  I am not exaggerating when I say that this possibly one of the Top 5 Mac applications that every Mac user should own.  It’s certainly worth trying, but believe me.  You won’t be disappointed.