Hi everyone. I apologize profusely for the sickeningly long post to follow, but I thought I'd offer some tips. Despite some irregularities and quirks, I have finally made peace with the AOL Radio site, and in fact, it has come to be one of my favorite music sites. I'll share below what I have found using JFW8 (with the setting enabled to ignore Flash on web pages), IE7 and Win XP home in the hope that this will help someone else.
Before we get started, I do recommend that you get an AOL screen name and password if you don't already have one (it is free). Signing in allows you to use presets (although you only get five which totally sucks considering that there are over 200 stations!). You need to make sure the AOL Radio applet is installed on your PC (not the entire AOL suite, just the AOL radio applet). If you go to the AOL Radio site for the first time, it will guide you in signing up and installing the player. Your browser's security settings may stop the player from installing, but you'll need to allow the installation in order for this to work. Now, off the main aolradio.com page, look for a heading that says Select a Music Style & Listen. Underneath this heading, pick a link with a style of music you like. What will then happen is that a new window will open up in your browser, which is the player window, and you will probably need to find the link to sign in, which you should do. The music will start playing (yes, I know its not a station you really want, but I haven't figured out how to keep that from happening). You can use the minus and equals signs to raise/lower the volume in case you're unlucky enough to have it come up blowing your head off. Now lets look at the player window so we can pick a station we really want. Look for a heading that says Stations by category list. This list is composed of the name of each category, and each category is preceeded by a graphic which actually expands the category. Arrow through the list so you can get a feel for the different categories, but For the sake of example, let's pick the very first category listed, which is AOL Recommends. Arrow around until you hear AOL Recommends. Now arrow up once, and you will hear something fairly nonsensical like images/main_nav_plus2006-11-21_15-16-27 (the numbers may not be the sane on your system, which is okay). This is the graphic you want to press spacebar on, which expands and collapses the AOL Recommends category, a concept very similar to the Windows tree view. Now that we have expanded this category, we can arrow through the stations in this category. Let's pick the first station, which at the time of this post was XM '70s. Arrow down until you hear XM 70s. Now press spacebar or enter on this link. What we have done is to select the station, but we haven't actually told the player to play it yet. Now let's hit your control-home to go to the top of the player window. Hit the letter G three times to get to a graphic that says "press spacebar to toggle between stop and play". Okay, don't press spacebar here. This is where things get a bit interesting, but once you understand it, you'll have the whole thing licked. This is actually the graphic that stops the music. When you are listening to a station and you want it to stop, you could press spacebar on this graphic and the music will stop. Okay, we have a station selected, the 70s station, and we want to play it, so now lets press our G key to go to the next graphic. And what does this graphic say? Yep, it says "press spacebar to toggle between stop and play". Sound familiar? LOL. However, even though this graphic has the same name as the one before it, it does an entirely different thing. Press spacebar here, and the 70s station should start up. So in summary, the process goes like this. From the main AOL Radio page, pick a category by pressing enter on the name of the category you want. The player window opens, you are asked to sign in, and a station plays (probably not the station you want unfortunately). Now, in the player window, arrow down until you get to the list of categories, which are preceeded by a graphic which expands the category. Use the graphic above the category to expand it, arrow down through the list of stations and press spacebar or enter on the link with the name of the station you want. This selects the station, but doesn't play it. Hit control-home to go to the top of the window and hit the G key four times. Press spacebar on this graphic, and it will play the selected station. Remember that there are two graphics right in a row that say "press spacebar to toggle between stop and play", but if this were a perfect world and they were labeled correctly, the first one would be labeled stop, and the second would be labeled play. Got that? I hope this helps solve the mystery a little. I know my vacuous brain is making this sound more difficult than it really is, but trust me folks, this is totally doable if you understand the associated quirks. Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]