Well sort of live, I am running a minimal playlist of a few programs in Zararadio and streaming from an FM radio tuned to 89.7 Mhz. I have a Grundig G3 plugged into the line input on the streaming computer so when you tune into the stream from http://thefreeproject.no-ip.org you will be hearing what it would sound like if you could listen to our station on an FM radio in my yard or across the road.
This is a test at this point to see how well this configuration works for a long term plan.
Enjoy
Barry of Blue Bucket Radio 89.7 FM & AM 1620
Global Community Radio 1
We are back to our regular scheduled broadcast with programming from Global Community Radio 1 , the all talk programming format we switched to a few months ago. Programs produced by members of Part15.us and from around the world are carried during the weekend.
We will be adding one more show to our line up this weekend which was offered by GCR 1 Jason Longwell, It’s called Clearing the Static. CTS is a weekly one hour talk show about the radio industry here in the US, and Canada. We discuss format changes, station sales, trends in radio programming, and we have guests on the show in an interview style quite frequently. That will air 8 pm ET Sundays.
No Audio Again
It’s 9:30 PM EDT and I’m streaming from Blue Bucket’s Icecast server but hear no audio.
I can bring the stream into the VLC Player by using the Mountpoint (/live) following the Port #, but when I click on the M3U button on the Sever Page it won’t play for me.
There are many ins and outs and ups and downs about streaming that I still don’t get.
GETTING IT NOW!
9:46 PM EDT I am hearing the Stuph File Show in full fidelity! Fabulous!
Windows XP froze
Windows Xp froze up under pressure, everything should be good now once again.
I am thinking this setup with Windows Xp running on a Virtual Box is just not going to work in the long run, so far it has shut down three times with no rhyme or reason. There is plenty of memory allocated, disk space is actually shared with the 1 Tb hard drive but for some unseen reason it just stops working.
I could understand it if Virtual Box was a trial software, but that is not the case.
I am stumped at this point.
Thanks for the report Carl, i hope others can chime in as well. The Grundig G3 i am using to feed the audio to the encoder has a neat little feature on the right side of the radio. It is an earphone jack that operates as both an input and an output jack, just push a button on the front of the receiver and it toggles between output or input settings.
The output is a bit hot so adjustments had to be made in the software on the streaming computer, no big deal though.
I set the receiver to local and the telescopic antenna is folded down to hopefully reduce over driving the receiver, it would be cool if i could offer two versions of this stream, one from an AM radio and this stream from FM.
Maybe in the future. Right now i am just happy it all works.
Barry of Blue Bucket Radio
Kept It On for Awhile
I re-broadcast the stream at 89.9 MHz for the past hour.
Soon I’ll have my AMT3000 AM 1640 on the air and will transmit all part 15 streamers and programs!
At Just Past 1 AM Eastern
Two or more program feeds are coming over the Blue Bucket Stream at the same time.
Radio From the Distance
Barry’s good idea: “it would be cool if i could offer two versions of this stream, one from an AM radio and this stream from FM.”
In addition to streaming from radios it would be novel to leave the open frequency live-on-stream after the station carriers sign off.
If you look at the server page for WMUK you will see that they offer six different streams through a single instance of Icecast
WMUK SERVER
Icecast Config
Carl,
I guess a second stream is possible just by adding a second set of parameters to the original config file.
There is the question of how to feed the second radio to the server, i am actually down to two computers at this time. I still have two Dell Desktops pc’s , one of which was the automation computer for Rock 105 three in London,Ky when we lived there.
But i have promised to set those pc’s up for the two youngest kids.
Maybe I should look around at flea markets for a used laptop or desktop pc before those flea markets close for the season. As for sign off and playing the static over the stream, neat idea for the AM stream. Our FM never goes off unless there is a power outage or I am doing something on the station computer that requires other software be offline.
Barry of Blue Bucket Radio 1620
Past Experience
In 2008 I turned on 2-instances of Winamp, gave each one a separate playlist, each one had a Shoutcast Server, and I was able to run two radio streams from one computer, KDX1 and KDX2.
If you have enough CPU power and memory it could work.
New plan
After some careful consideration, contemplation and aggravation, I have decided to let my netbook handle the playout and encoding to the Icecast2 server. Something I didn’t think i would have to do but apparently even this desktop pc has it’s limits and judgeing by the resource meter app on my pc i just barely have enough Ram to do all that i want to on the pc.
So this evening I will be preparing the netbook for playout, enoding and i will have to swap some cables around as well.
Right now, we have dead air. My internet is once again intermitten. Sigh.
Barry of Blue Bucket Radio 1620
Struggling Station of the Nation
To Struggling Station
It’s been several days of Icecast exploration to figure best-ways to integrate the radio server software with the Home Web Hosting software.
One thing I’ve learned is how expensive things can get for people who don’t do it themselves.
Here is a link to a professional “Managed Hosting Service” that provides Icecast and Shoutcast audio/video streaming for radio stations and others. You can “calculate the cost”.
FASTSERV
This information ties in with my search to figure out what the Icecast Config File means by the line titled “Host”, and the answer is… the website or location where the Icecast Server is operating.
In the case of Barry, MRAM and myself, we are running Icecast at our home “No-Ip” address, and in the case of radio stations who subscibe to a company like FastServe then the “Host” would be the IP address supplied by FastServe.
You guys probably already understood this, but it baffled me for a long time.
Titan
Titan is the actual name of this server and happens to be the host name as well, when Carl alerted me to my mistake in the icecast.cml congif file i used my no-ip url, if my internet service was more reliable then i would use the built in DNS servers to use my url http://www.bluebucketradio.com, my srever has already been assigned a static ip address on wlan.