How To Listen to Internet Radio Stations in Front Row

Written by: Michael Dougherty • Edited by: Michael Dougherty
Updated Jul 19, 2010 • Related Guides: Internet

The option to listen to Internet radio stations in Apple's Front Row application natively, or lack of, is currently one of the major shortcomings of the program. Here is a simple work-around to hold you over until Apple decides to add this option to a future version of Front Row.

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Apple’s Front Row application does an adequate job of handling local audio and video on your Mac but what about internet audio streams? This is one area that Front Row currently falls short in, providing no native way of playing internet audio streams. Does this mean you can’t play internet audio streams on your Mac from within Front Row? Absolutely not.

This then leaves us with the question, how do we enable the playback of internet audio streams from within Front Row? In truth it’s easier than you may have thought. Follow these five simple steps and you’ll be jamming to your favorite internet radio station from within Front Row in no time!

The Steps

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Locate your favorite internet audio streams under the Radio heading directly under your Library in iTunes or on the internet at your favorite radio station's website.
Drag the internet radio station to your music library if you are adding it from iTunes or save the playlist to your desktop then add it to your library if you are adding it from your favorite internet radio station's website.
Create a new smart playlist and name it Internet Audio Streams (or whatever you wish).
Configure your iTunes smart playlist with the settings displayed in the screenshot to the right.
Open Front Row, goto your playlists, select Internet Audio Streams (or whatever you named the playlist) and pick the internet radio station of your choice.

Accessing internet audio streams in Apple’s Front Row is really as easy as that! As a regular user of Front Row I would like Apple to address this shortcoming in future versions. While this workaround is simple and gets the job done I would like to see the option to access internet audio streams natively from within Front Row sooner rather than later. In my opinion an interface within Front Row to access your favorite internet radio stations should have been included from the start.

Note for LittleSnitch Users

One final thing to note for users of the LittleSnitch firewall is that you will have to make sure that LittleSnitch is setup to allow outgoing and incoming connections from the internet for Front Row on the ports used by each internet audio stream (or all ports). If you forget to do this you will find yourself wondering why this workaround won’t work for you.