Hi Mary, Donna, Mark, and Others,
The other way to locate streams that have been placed in the iTunes
music library (in case you weren't able to use Command-L for the
stream while it was playing) is to use the smart playlist feature and
with a rule like "Kind contains stream". From anywhere in iTunes,
press Command-Option-N to create a new smart playlist. You'll hear
"smart playlist, selected by". Then, VO-Right arrow so that you hear
"rules section" and interact (VO-Shift-Down arrow), in order to supply
a rule or rules for inclusion in the smart play list. You'll be on
the pop up button that says "Artist". Use VO-Space and then press "k"
to change this to "Kind" in the menu for the pop up, then press return
to commit this change. VO-Right arrow past the pop up button for
"Contains" to the text field and type in "stream" without the
quotation marks. Then press return to commit all changes and leave
the smart playlist. You'll be prompted in a "Name Playlist" dialog
window to enter a name for your playlist. The name "stream" will be
entered as the default suggestion, but you can type in your own
selection. Press return to commit your changes. Now, there will be a
smart playlist in your sources table named "stream" or whatever title
you assigned. If you want this to appear at the top of your smart
playlist entries, add a hyphen to the start of the name you choose,
since all playlists appear ordered alphabetically by category in the
sources table. A playlist name like that is preceded by a hyphen or
other character that appears alphabetically before letters or numbers
will show up first in the list of smart playlists, before default
smart playlists like "recently played".
Downloaded files with names like "listen.pls" or "listen-1.pls" don't
show up as playlists in iTunes. Instead, their contents appear as
streams in the music library. The list of iTunes radio streams is
fixed to only include the streams that appear in that category.
However, you can construct your own playlists of streams. Use either
the context menu for selections and "add to playlist" or copy and
paste the entries to a playlist.
The usual difficulty people have is locating the streams after they
have been added -- hence, Mark suggested using Command-L to track the
stream as it is playing. The smart playlist solution is a quick way
to find all streams in your library -- including the ones that got
added before you could identify the tracks. Then, you can use "Get
Info" (Command-I) and navigate to the "Info" tab for the entry to add
tag information or even your own comments to make these streams easier
to locate for iTunes searches. Or, you can simply go back to your
"stream" or "-stream" (that's the same name, "stream", but with a
hyphen preceding the name) smart playlist to locate your streams.
My description of creating the smart playlist was a bit sloppy from a
pedagogic point of view -- if you use VO-Space instead of pressing
return to select pop up menu items you don't run the risk of exiting
the smart playlist early. (VO-Space is used to "perform the default
action"). And you should really stop interacting with the rules
sections (VO-Shift Up Arrow) then navigate (e.g. with VO-Right arrow)
to the "OK" button and press it with VO-Space to nicely view the other
smart playlist options and commit the changes to the smart playlist.
Because I'm familiar with the smart playlist menu structure, I press
the return key to commit my changes and exit the menu whenever I'm
finished setting specifications and I press the escape key to cancel
actions and quit instead of navigating to the "Cancel" button and
pressing it with VO-Space. For a detailed description of smart
playlists in iTunes, see the (long) archived post titled "Introduction
to Smart Playlists (long)" at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/macvisionaries%40googlegroups.com/msg01294.html
HTH
Cheers,
Esther
On Feb 1, 2010, Mary Otten wrote:
Thanks, Mark. You rock! Itunes let me make a playlist with the
current song, so that should do it.
Mary
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