Bring Thousands of Radio Stations to Media Center With RadioTime
by Michael Healy @ 9:00 am on August 6th, 2009 in plugins, streaming music with 23 Comments and Permalink
Looking to increase your options for online radio inside of Windows 7 Media Center? RadioTime boasts over 100,000 radio stations in it’s directory and has created a Windows Media Center plugin to allow you to access it all from your HTPC. Access music, talk, sports and world radio as well as an easy to use directory of local stations for use with your radio tuner.
To get started head over to the Media Center plugin page and download the new installer which includes support for Windows 7. Downloading the installer, found in the link below the green Get It Now button, is your best bet on Windows 7 as mixed results have been reported with the Get It Now installation. Once installed you’ll find RadioTime in your Extra Programs menu.
Upon first opening the RadioTime plugin you’ll be presented with a random selection of online radio options from the directory. Each time you enter the plugin it will suggest new stations though they don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason behind the suggestions. Presenting a selection of stations based on listening history would have been preferred.
From here you can also browse by station type. Selecting a type from Talk, Music, World or Sports will give you an additional genre selection option. With the exception of Sports, each station type has a number of genres to select from.
Browsing through the stations you can play them directly from this interface or in some cases get more information on a particular station. Most stations don’t provide this extra information but pressing the Info button will allow you to add a station to your presets. For those the do give extra information, which will be denoted by the current show title displayed below the station, you can get a listing of the show schedule as well.
That’s really all there is to browsing through the RadioTime directory to find and listen to your favorite or even new internet radio stations. For those with a hardware FM tuner, which is a typical feature of your TV tuner hardware, you can even browse and tune local stations.You’ll need to enable FM tuning in the top right corner of the local listings then you’ll be able to browse and tune your local FM stations right from RadioTime.
There you have it! Easy to use internet and local radio from RadioTime. Be sure to stick around Hack7MC as we review even more Windows 7 Media Center plugins.
