A lot of us use a number of different streaming music apps — from Pandora, Spotify and Rdio to the streaming stations on iTunes. They’re great for music, but sometimes you want to listen to an actual station. We’ve talked about our favorite for iOS (TuneIn Radio), but since we spend a lot of time in front of our screens we thought we’d mention a good option for Macs as well.

Radium is available on the app store for $9.99, which means you should probably be sure this is a service you’d use before going for it. Once installed and opened, a small heart appears on your menu bar. Click on it for a search field, and type in the call letters or name of a station you’re looking for. As with TuneIn Radio, any station with an internet stream (which is most of them these days) will appear. You can click on the little heart next to each station to save it to your favorites. 

You can also choose to have the track name of what’s currently playing show up on your menu bar as well, and show album art on your desktop if you like seeing a visual representation of what you’re listening to. Folks with musical ears may want to make use of the equalizer, as well. If it’s a song you really like, it’ll give you the purchase option through iTunes or Amazon, and you can add tracks to your wish list to keep a running list of songs you like.

And of course, like most apps these days, there’s a social component built in — you can share your current listening with twitter or add it to your last.fm listening list.

All in all, we think Radium is a great little app for anyone who listens to a lot of music and online radio. We use a bunch of services here at our stores, and sometimes Pandora and Spotify get boring or off track. Listening to radio curated by actual people can be a nice change!

What apps do you use for music and radio?