The primary cause for Ares Galaxy’s existence and the most common reason why people use our program is of course its file sharing potential. Both through the integrated separate Ares Galaxy network as through the gigantic BitTorrent community, users of our program can easily find and share all the files they might want, at no cost to themselves except for a bit of bandwidth.
But Ares Galaxy has many more tricks up its sleeve besides just the downloading and the sharing. One of these tricks is the internet radio functionality, through which you can listen to hundreds of thousands (or more, we haven’t actually counted them!) of radio stations for free, located all over the world, while you use the program for file sharing or just have it running in the background!
How To Use The Ares Radio
The Radio button is somewhat hidden at the bottom of the program, in the media tab, which you will see, regardless of which panel you have open (Library, Screen, Search, Transfer, Chat or Control Panel). This means that the radio option is always close at hand and a simple click will suffice to bring up the radio menu.
The button in question is the one on the far right, next to the volume button. It should bring up ‘Internet Radio’ when you hover over it. Clicking on this button will give you a small menu with which you’ll be able to configure the stations. It also gives you a few links to online databases of internet radio stations.
If you already know which radio you want to listen to, click on ‘New Radio’ and type or paste the URL to the station in the pop-up window like in the example in the following screenshot, and the radio will immediately begin to play.
Finding Stations
As we already made clear, Ares Galaxy is first and foremost a file sharing program. It does a variety of other things as well, and is often very good at these other things too, but in order to stay close to the real intent of the program, some functions which may seem obvious are sometimes skipped over.
If you are a big fan of internet radio, and you expect an integrated search function in Ares, like there is for finding and sharing files, you’re sadly out of luck. In order to play radio, you’re going to have to find it yourself. However, Ares does offer you not just one, but three different links to some of the biggest databases of online radio stations in the world: SHOUTcast, Tuner2 and RadioToolBox.
Clicking on any of those three will open your browser and bring you to the relevant database. All you have to do next is find the station you want and copy the URL. Once you have the URL, make a ‘New Radio’ and paste or type it in! This URL is usually very easy to find and tends to be either a web address or an IP address, followed by a port number.