1. I'm surprised you didn't address the big question sure to be on the minds of everyone who uses AOL Radio 1.x -- are "my" stations going to go away? :)

Cheers
Chas

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Hey Chas,
With AOL Radio 2.0 beta, there's no need to log in, but you will need to reset your Favorites. When we ship, you can set up a very large Favorites list and assign your top channels to presets. This makes managing the 300 stations a bit easier.

thanks,
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 7:25PM on Jul 25th 2008 by chasbah

2. AOL management has changed, severely, over the past several years... From allowing me to have my AOL floppy disk collection which was upgraded to my AOL CD collection. Only recently, like last year, I began listening to AOL Radio, mostly because I *was* an XM Radio customer when I lived in the USA. Now that I'm now living in Philippines, AOL Radio has been my choice of iTunes radio, which has advertisements. In AOL Radio, I only hear "AOL Radio dot com" every 10-15 minutes, which is per regulation of the FCC in the USA, to ID itself. I guess as AOL Radio 2.0 Beta is coming out, I should get myself active in the AOL Mac Blog, because, if I don't, AOL may make choices causing me to go with Shoutcast or iTunes, as a replacement, as AOL did in 2002, causing me to switch from AOL as my ISP to another provider.
If AOL Radio 2.0 is to be released, AOL needs to keep the AIM databases intact... From what I observed, AOL Radio is *now* browser based and the Favorite Channels are not locally stored on the hard drive. I'm able to listen to "AOL Radio powered by CBS Radio" in Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, but all are storing my favorite channels as files on my hard drive. This is unlike the AOL Radio player, currently for Mac, which favorite channels are stored on AOL's servers.
With the new browser based interface, AOL now knows what you listen to... Really! They'll pick up your favorite music channels and then post graphical advertisements in AOL Radio, as your listening. In some cases, those advertisements can cause your music to become choppy has a new ad is being downloaded.



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Hey Marcos,
AOL Radio 2.0 beta will stream radio to your Mac and will not store any files in a temp folder or anything. Also, with the new player, there's no need to log in. Just launch and listen.

I hope this answers your questions.

Thanks,
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 2:23AM on Jul 26th 2008 by Marcos

3. I just checked the web page for 1.2 and found the interface much less appealing and less user friendly. In fact, downright ugly. While listening to Neil Young on 1.2, the same channel on the web had Randy Newman. I am very unhappy I won't be able to launch aol radio from my deck icon, is this another way to push perfectly happy 10.4 users to buy Leopard?
Lee, you haven't explained the need to change the interface, as in if it ain't broke....

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Hey Bruce,
Please take a look at my comments under the other posts for more details...We're working to get the best software our for our Mac users in the shortest time possible.

Please keep your comments coming, we read each and every one of them.

thanks,
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 10:57AM on Jul 26th 2008 by Bruce Conord

4. This sucks, I can't think of any reason to alienate the millions of Mac users who have no need for 10.5, who both professionally and at home find 10.4 to be perfectly sufficient.

This smacks of some collusion between aol and apple to force Mac users to upgrade what... works fine for them.

I want the concept of a stand alone application... if aol wants to force me to a web interface, so long, there are some nicer alternatives to aol radio and come 7/30, that's where I will go.

pandora.com is much better if you want to use a web page as a radio player.

ANY plea for ANY aol service will 100% fall on deaf ears here.

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Hey Riversideguy,
Nope, no conspiracy theories here :) The AOL Mac Team is working to get the best software out to our users in the fastest time frames. Working with two code bases requires 2x the dev effort and 2x the testing. The web version will have access to the same channels and stream quality. Following up with our iPhone version of AOL Radio, we can share most of the code since iPhone OS is derived from Leopard. Adding Tiger support doubles our time to market.

We do appreciate your feedback.

Regards,
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 2:37PM on Jul 26th 2008 by riverside_guy

5. I will NOT use a web page interface. If the stand alone application stops working I will stop listening.

------------------------------
Hey Glenn,
I appreciate your comments. With the differences in Leopard and Tiger development areas and since iPhone shares it's OS with Leopard, we have decided to move the code base up to Leopard for Radio. Benefits from moving to Leopard for our development team is time to market, single code base, increased application quality and cost. We will have to maintain two separate code bases to support Tiger & Leopard.

Regards,
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 10:07PM on Jul 27th 2008 by glenn.malling

6. Looks good, Lee. Excited to see the new 2.0.

Hopefully one day, too, the Radio for iPhone will work in Canada. :)

Posted at 8:45PM on Jul 28th 2008 by Dino

7. MAC has all but abandoned OS 10.3.9 users and now AOL joins them in freezing us out. THAT IS the bottom line.

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Hey DB, Apple hasn't abandoned Panther, it's still a very good OS. Just wanted to let everyone know that AOL Radio application is a Mac-ONLY application. There's no standalone app for Windows. All Windows users have to use the web version or access the stations through WinAmp.

This release is based on code that won the first Apple Design Award for iPhone Entertainment apps.

Thanks...
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 9:42AM on Jul 29th 2008 by DB

8. Hey Lee,

I've been trying to use the old AOL player all day with no luck (totally didn't notice it was the 30th ALREADY, DUH!). The problem though is that I can't find where to download the new 2.0 beta. Is it not ready? Do we need to use the web interface in between today and when 2.0beta comes out? If that's the case...why not allow the old one to work 'till 2.0beta is ready?

Thanks!

-------------------------Hey Raf,thanks for visiting our blog...you can get your hands on the AOL Radio 2.0 beta by visting: http://beta.aol.com/projects.php?project=radioformac2thanks...
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 11:32PM on Jul 30th 2008 by Raf

9. No AOL Radio 2.0 beta to download? :/
All the hype, and no product to download…

Posted at 2:16AM on Jul 31st 2008 by maya

10. You can get the download here:

http://beta.aol.com/

Posted at 3:35AM on Jul 31st 2008 by johnnyv1315

11. I just installed the Mac 2.0 beta. I love the greater selections, but what I really miss from the previous version are two features.

1. one was able to change the color of the player

2. the amount of time the selection was playing was displayed; that's gone

Will these two features be back?

Posted at 6:07AM on Aug 2nd 2008 by mrpea

12. Am I correct in my belief that the XM stations are now gone?

Thanks.


DJ

------------------------
Yep, take a look at a recent post on the Mac@AOL blog on XM Radio.

thanks...
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 9:14PM on Aug 25th 2008 by davidcjones

13. where can i find operas

Posted at 10:09PM on Aug 17th 2008 by rja1115

14. i know about 20 mac users that loved aol radio 10.4. tiger.....we all have stopped listening because of the inconvenience of the new interface....its terrible....aol really dug themselves on this one....it's turning into a mac word and aol is holding on to the pc community.....wake up...make the old version work again!!!!!!!!!!!!!how could a marketing team overlook so much!!!!!!!! time after time i keep being let down by aol. it all started when they went free but kept charging my account....been a customer for 10 years! no refund? no roger , no re-run, no rent!!!!!!!!!!!!!! listeners use your itunes radio....

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Hello Tom,
Can you be a bit more specific? What interface issues are you referring to?

thanks...
Lee Givens
AOL Mac Product Lead

Posted at 10:04AM on Aug 18th 2008 by tom

15. Is there some reason that coming out with a new Leopard-only version of the software had to completely break the old Tiger-compatible version? I'm rather frustrated by this. I can understand why you might stop continuing to develop and update the old 1.x series, but why must it stop working altogether? I'm so angry about this I don't even want to use AOL Radio on my iPhone right now.

--Shafted Tiger User, Bryan

Posted at 3:36PM on Aug 23rd 2008 by Bryan