Is Radio Dead? Not With Radio Gaga On Your Mac

Who says radio is dead? It may not be very good sometimes. There are more radio stations than ever. But radio isn’t dead for Mac users.

The latest cool Mac radio application is Radio Gaga. It’s a different look. And a different way to do radio. Record many internet radio stations at the same time, drop them into iTunes for export to your iPhone or iPod. Radio Gaga’s directory gets updated automatically, now with over 10,000 internet radio stations.

That’s a lot of radio stations to sort through, right? Radio Gaga makes it easy by categorizing those stations into a directory of genres. 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s stations have dozens each. There’s over 128 stations worldwide which play blues music.

Radio Gaga’s directory has classical, comedy, country, dance, disco, electronic, folk, jazz, hip-hop and rap, as well as reggae, latin, heavy metal, sports, talk and news.

Navigation is easy. Click on a big bubble icon for your selected genre and up pops a list of all the stations by name, rating, bit rate, and so on. Select a particular station and click the Play button. After a few seconds of buffering, Radio Gaga begins to play the station.

The big red Record button lets you record music from the station you selected. Another button allows you to send the recording directly to iTunes, which can sync with your iPhone or iPod.

If you have sufficient bandwidth, Radio Gaga can download and record multiple internet radio stations at the same time. The recordings are saved as MP3 audio so they’ll play fine on your Mac, a PC, or iPod and iPhone. There’s even a set of filters which let you record only music, and not the rest of radio garbage.

Even better, Radio Gaga has a scheduler. If your Mac is at home and you’re at work, Radio Gaga will record specific stations at specific times, even multiple stations at once. Each recording is stored in the Tracks library so you can save and sort at will, or click to send to iTunes.

If you have a favorite radio station that isn’t in Radio Gaga’s list of 10,000, just add it and the station is ready for playing and recording.

So you can play and work at the same time, Radio Gaga has a pop up controller which minimizes on your Mac’s screen with Record, Play buttons and Volume slider, as well as a read out of the current station and song.

What’s not to like? Radio Gaga isn’t free like AOL Radio (which has a few hundred stations) or SHOUTcast Radio which features up to 25,000 internet radio stations.

From my usage, Radio Gaga is a more pleasant experience, especially when it comes to recording internet radio stations, and getting the recordings over to iTunes. It’s massively simple and actually fun.