Accessing internet radio via Vista

Radio remains a thriving source of music, news, education, comedy and drama, and the advent of digital technology simply means you have more choice in terms of what you can listen to and how to tune in.

In this feature we’re going to set out how you can enjoy radio via a Vista PC and give you greater freedom to choose how and when to listen.

Station access
There are two main ways of accessing radio stations on your Vista PC - either via a ‘proper’ radio tuning device or by tuning into the many radio services that are now broadcasting over the internet.

There are few dedicated radio add-ons for computers. USB and PCI radio receivers are available and shouldn’t cost you much more than £40, but few are currently compatible with Vista and fewer still with Media Center. You can buy a DAB digital USB dongle for just £39.95 at online gadget store Gizoo, for instance, but it only works with Windows XP.

If your PC has a built-in TV tuner, however, there’s a good chance that it may already have a radio receiver. Many analogue TV tuners, for example, feature an FM tuner and you may even be able to set up Media Center to tune into FM broadcasts and create presets.

If you don’t already have a TV tuner, then it’s easy to kill two birds with one stone by installing something like the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 (around £60 from Amazon, www.amazon.co.uk), which comes with its own software for viewing and recording TV and listening to radio.

If your FM/TV tuner is compatible with Media Center (as the WinTV-PVR-150 is), you’ll be able to access broadcasts via Microsoft’s entertainment software. Launch Media Centre from the Start menu and scroll vertically to the Music section, from where you can scroll left or right through the options to the one labelled Radio. A tuning screen will appear that enables you to type in the FM frequency. Full help on using an FM tuner in Media Center is available here.

Access all tuners
In a similar way, virtually all digital (Freeview) TV tuners come with built-in access to digital radio stations. If you have Freeview on your television set you may have found radio stations while flicking through the channel listings - the same principle applies to Freeview (DVB-T) tuners that come in PCs.

DVB-T may have a slightly smaller range of stations compared with DAB (27 compared to anything up to 60 on DAB, depending where you live), but because of the way DVB-T is broadcast, some stations can actually provide higher quality audio via a Freeview tuner than via DAB.

If you don’t have a digital TV tuner, you can buy one either as an internal PCI card or as a USB add-on. Obviously, the latter is easier to set up, but if you’re serious about using your computer as an entertainment system to tune into and record TV and radio, we definitely recommend a twin-tuner model such as the Hauppauge WinTV Nova T-500. You also need to make sure that any device you buy is 100 per cent compatible with Vista and Media Center.

To access DVB-T radio, you just need to set up Media Center’s TV signal. Find out how to do so here. As the PC scans for available TV stations, it will also pick up DVB-T radio stations.