ArtisanRadio

I see it a lot on Hobbybroadcaster.net.  As well as here.

It seems that someone is always perpetually angry and railing against individuals or something in the world of radio, and Part 15 in particular.

Whether it’s corporate radio, the greedy licensing bodies, the NAB, the Part 15 rules, FM trolls. supposed ‘pirates’ or even ‘saving radio’, the results are the same.  There’s always something wrong.

And you know what?  There is.  Always.  It’s that way everywhere and in anything.

But all this negativity takes away from why we do what we do in the field of unlicensed broadcasting.  It drags everyone down.  And it doesn’t accomplish anything.

I’d like to see this Forum (and others) get back to basics.  Talking about the theory and practice of Part 15 radio.  Because at the end of the day you can’t control what’s going on around you.  You can only control what YOU do.

I plan on doing what I’m doing until, well, I can’t.  Until that time, from this point on, I’m not going to worry about anything else.

I just purchased a vintage transcription phonograph, capable of playing 16 inch transcriptions – it’s a Califone 6U-7C Executive II with a self contained tube amplifier. At first, it had a horrible hum, but its origin was tracked down to the AC outlet it was plugged into – I switched it to a different outlet, one on a separate circuit, and the hum was greatly reduced.

I also have hundreds of 16 inch transcriptions that have sat idle for some time.

Merge the two, and I will be doing digital encodes of most of them over the next while. Most old time radio programs have been determined to be in the public domain in both the U.S. and Canada (they’re considered differently than music), and I will be making the new encodes of these available on the ALPB website (exact manner to be determined).

Types of programs to be available: Guest Star (a lot of these), Philco Radio Time, Red Skelton, Country Hoedown (hey, I didn’t say that they were all classics) to name a few from the top of the pile that I just glanced at. While I don’t think that many (if any) are rare or not already available, I will be encoding them at relatively high bitrates, so the quality may be better than available encodes (many of which are low bitrates and low relatively quality). I don’t think I’ll do much audio processing, other than running them through an Audacity filter to get rid of whatever hum is remaining, as I find that too much processing actually reduces the quality of the original material.

The other blog thread on this topic kind of got hijacked, so I thought I’d start up one of my own. In that blog entry, someone claimed that the Internet will take over radio’s functions shortly, and that AM and FM will be dead.

Not so, I say.

As a matter of fact, the Internet, while it certainly can and does stream audio and video, was not designed for this function. It’s unicast (each user needs his/her own data stream), which is certainly not the most efficient way to listen to a common audio stream. It’s also pull technology (you have to request a connection, it has to be set up, etc.). My philosophy has always been to use the right tools for the job – you can attempt to dig a hole with a broom, but there are going to be significant limitations in using that particular tool. Just as in using the Internet to get to a mass audience in a radio-like manner.

Wireless internet, with all the coolness associated with it, is still the Internet, with all it’s inherent limitations.

Radio is classic push technology and it’s the ultimate multicast – people just need to tune in to the same radio frequency to get the same data. It’s the most efficient (and cheapest) way to get an audio stream to just about anyone, and there are no bandwidth limitations (other than the range of the signal, of course).

If you’re going to look for technologies to replace radio as it now exists, then you’re probably going to look at digital radio using the same basic paradigm as today’s analog radio. Just as digital TV has replaced the classic analog TV (and it works very well, thank you very much – with EPG’s, program information etc. contained within the TV stream).

Now, I do believe that people’s listening habits have changed, but the central technology behind that was the ability to carry your own music along with you, starting with cassettes and the walkman to today’s digital memory cards. That’s mostly what is being listened to on the ipods and iphones (and other portable devices) of today. Nothing to do with the Internet at all. I believe that that will continue, but it will not supplant radio. You get your news from radio, sports, new songs, the time, weather, etc.

There is a place for the Internet in radio broadcasting. You can use it to store program archives, elicit comments and yes, even to listen live, particularly for remote listeners. But there are significant bandwidth implications to support even a small number of listeners with a reasonable quality stream – you will never, ever be able to support anything more than a very small fraction of a radio stations total number of listeners (licensed radio station, that is, for Part 15, it may indeed be a large percentage of their listeners).

… for the winter, while I’m at my home base. A little smaller in scope (mostly vintage jazz, 50’s & 60’s & Old Time Radio). I’ve grown used to listening to my own station, and after attempting to find something else in the licensed world that will compare, I’ve given up.

I’m now in the process of setting up my automation computer – shortly after Artisan Radio went off the air prior to my recent RV trip, the that computer went phfffft! How’s that for timing?

So, the Best Music That You’ve Probably Never Heard will be back shortly.

This is the final weekend of broadcasting for Wired For Sound Radio (http://www.wiredforsoundradio.com) , the sister station of Artisan Radio. 24/7 streaming of the music of Cliff Richard.

This is the final weekend of broadcasting for Wired For Sound Radio (http://www.wiredforsoundradio.com) , the sister station of Artisan Radio. 24/7 streaming of the music of Cliff Richard.

There certainly are some rabid Cliff fans out there. We ran a series of specials, including an interview with Cliff, 2 hours of fan requests and more. In the past, these kinds of special events ran our simultaneous listener total way, way up. This weekend, we peaked at slightly less than 100.

Just a quick word on our setup – we run (soon to be ran) our own server, with a Business high speed cable connection which allows well over 10 Mbps download, and 5 Mbps upload. With the station streaming at 40KBps, that gives us upload bandwidth to support (at least theoretically) 125 simultaneous listeners.

Well, I’m happy to report that we were able to do that. There were no discernable hiccups once a listener connected; as the # of users went up, occasionally there were delays in connecting. The server runs Windows 2000, by far the best Windows O/S for real time response. Icecast to serve the stream. It’s not a particularly powerful computer – a 3 Ghz single core processor, and 2 GB of memory. And on another computer, Zara for automation and OddCast for generating the stream.

It just goes to show that you can support a good number of listeners at a reasonable bitrate with your own server, and you don’t have to rely on external providers, whose reliability can be questionable – and the right Internet plan, of course. Generally, uploading is the achilles heel of even Business internet plans.

It also goes to show that special event programming, appropriately promoted, tends to generate more response than run of the mill stuff (prior to this weekend, the typical number of listeners varied between 1-10).