Hi,
Yes, going to your "Recently Added" playlist is a great general way of
finding recent content. This tip is not limited to streams, but also
helps you find anything that has just been added to iTunes (within the
last two weeks, and not a podcast), so it's particularly useful to
find content which was added, but which lacks tagging information.
You can select these items and use "Get Info" (Command-I) to add this
information. I was going to suggest using "Recently Added", but it
struck me that some people may have played other streams in the past
(i.e., added more than 2 weeks ago) and wondered where they went.
Creating a smart playlist that shows all streams is a good way to
solve that problem. Thanks for the suggestion, Ricardo; it's a good
one.
Cheers,
Esther
On Feb 1, 2010, Ricardo Walker wrote:
Hi,
Or you can also go to your "Recently Added playlist". Depending on
how you have your fields sorted, ascending, or descending, it will
be near the top or bottom of the list.
On Feb 1, 2010, at 1:56 PM, Esther wrote:
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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