I’ve installed Apple Airplay speakers around my home and love to listen to music and the radio as I move around the house. I’ve created a playlist with all my favourite radio stations but for some reason, Classic FM UK isn’t included in the list in iTunes. It turns out that it is quite easy to add Classic FM Radio to your iTunes set-up so you can listen to their live stream on your Apple Mac. First of all, you’ll need to create a playlist for your radio stations and then drag a few of your favourites over to the list. You should then end up with a playlist something like this:
Now we can add Classic FM… To do this select File>Open Stream and then enter “http://media-ice.musicradio.com/ClassicFMMP3.m3u” for example:
The above screenshot was taken using Apple iTunes on a Mac a few years back. In 2019 Apple release macOS Catalina which saw iTunes replaced by Apple Music and the separate Podcasts app. I’m pleased to say that for these instructions, wherever I’ve said iTunes the process is the same in Apple Music. To prove this the screenshot below is from Apple Music.
When you click OK Classic FM should start to play. iTunes has automatically added this to what looks like a Playlist called Internet Songs
You can now drag ClassicFMMP3 to your Radio Stations playlist so you can easily find it in the future.
In iTunes if you press Cmd i when you have Classic FM selected it will display the station information as shown below…
It’s good to confirm that the stream we’ve added is at 128kbps and 44.10 Khz – so it’s an almost CD quality audio stream. You can then click on the Info tab and edit the description so that it looks better in your iTunes Playlist.
Job done, you can now enjoy Classic FM Radio from iTunes / Apple Music and listen to their live stream online over your Apple AirPlay speakers.
I must give credit to Jonathan Rawle’s excellent blog that detailed where to find the stream URL’s for Classic FM. I had to experiment a bit to make this work reliably. I found that some of the potential streams work for a while and indeed you can add them to your playlist but later they don’t work when you click on them in the playlist. The URL I’ve used here is working reliably for me. Finally for completeness, if this doesn’t work for you do check that you have an up to date version of iTunes installed.
This blog was written when I was running iTunes 11.0.4. Let me know how you get on with this.
Updated December 27th 2019 to reflect that this still works in Apple Music on macOS Catalina. If you have any problems with this set-up do please leave a question below and I’ll be pleased to try and help you get this working.
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