When I surveyed other Mac internet radio apps earlier this year, I discovered that stations owned by either iHeart or Entercom were often missing. Indeed, I was able to find pretty much every station on my local Portland, Oregon radio dial. So where are all the real internet radio stations? Search, you must, young Jedi. But click on it and you just get more featured Apple Music stations, along with a list of genres that – you guessed it – deliver even more Apple Music stations. Scroll down and you see a menu item, “Radio Stations,” that seems promising. Sure, there’s a “Radio” button in the menu, but what you get is mostly populated by Beats 1 and Apple Music stations, along with a smattering of big public and commercial stations. The first big difference is that the Music app doesn’t really let you browse the world of internet radio.

This is very good news, though Music isn’t yet a full-fledged iTunes replacement. However, now the Music app now gives you access to a very comprehensive selection of both terrestrial and pure-play internet stations across the U.S. I’m happy to report that the situation is not as dire as I’d feared.Īn early release of the Music app on both MacOS and iOS featured only a handful of carefully chosen stations outside of Beats 1 Radio and Apple’s own curated stations, the latter only available with a paid Apple Music subscription.

While iTunes has its faults, it still provided a simple way to tune in stations from around the world without using a web browser, whether you found the station in its own directory or plugged in the station’s stream URL yourself. By Paul Riismandel on Novemin Internet radioīack in June I openly worried about the future state of internet radio on the Mac with the arrival of macOS Catalina and the demise of iTunes.

Itunes radio free