lcbo and modofo found a website where you can store 3 gb of music and compile mixes. these mixes will be streamed continuously for 2 weeks. they have to follow some official broadcast rules (e.g. at least 5 hours of music, not too many songs taken off the same record).

i was thinking about the conceptional aspects. what do you think about these ideas?

1. we make one mix every 2 weeks.
2. we choose a topic, e.g. bass lines, guitars, female voices, cover versions, summer, europe, cheese, all time favourites, whatever. every contributor compiles a list of songs that he associates with that topic.
3. the whole mix is made out of the individual lists.

this means that every participant will put a little effort into the project to have an exciting quality mix every two week that may even attract some people from outside to tune in.

we should see how many people we are and then we could say like "everyone suggests 10 + 3 songs or 30 + 10 minutes". the 3 songs or the 10 minutes are the replacements if someone suggests the same tracks. of course, these numbers are examples and they depend on the number of members.

one problem that we will encounter is the bitrate. the music is streamed at the bitrate that the file is encoded with. a high quality 192 bit song is streamed at that bitrate. this won't work for listeners on dial up.

sometimes i have even problems with the 48 bit stream on rare radio with adsl. the pavement stream you linked the other day works with 128 bit, though.

is there a way to re-encode an mp3 with lower quality other than mp3->aiff->mp3?

maybe the euroranch guys will be able to help with this: they regularly have low bitrate mp3s on the go...

well.. i'm not sure if the myplay.winamp thing will fly as a feasable way to broadcast..

<a href="www.artistovracy188.com<modofo and I have been using it to preview and share each others music..

it seems to work well.

email me if you'd like the login and password to my myplay.winamp locker

ps. my own radio station is still up.. well sometimes. kwota.net for the playlist and status.

hi there. Concerning the re-encoding issue, we have to decode/encode all the files before uploading to the streaming server at the desired bitrate of the m3u-stream (32 kbps/ 22 kHz/ mono). Since this can get a pain in the ass to manage file by file for longer playlists, we benefit from batch processing in wavelab. We tested our streams on several dial-ups and therefore choose mono for halved filesize. It takes a decent waveeditor, eg.wavelab or peak, to do a proper job on encoding low-bitrate-mono mp3s, most of the common tools produce nasty high frequenzy flutter because they simply add left and right channel. Me and a friend played around with shoutcast DNS for some time, but had to drop the idea of a decentralized service because of the lack of interested relay server friends and frequent contributors here in vienna. As for the effort to establish an internet radio station I really like kris' idea of a theme different folks contribute their personal 'view' to. Mix the Djs, mix the audience.

lcbo: why? are there additional problems?

h_h: do i understand correctly, you can give the batch processor mp3 files to change the quality? do you have enough bandwidth on your server to host a, say, weekly 2 hour radio broadcast?

technical ideas: let's assume we have a streaming server what else do we need? where can we get a common repository for mp3 files with enough bandwidth? audiogalaxy has a list of ftp severs with mp3s. maybe some admins of them are interested in getting quality input from us. downloading from the repository, reencoding and uploading to the streaming server should be scriptable and i think i could do the programming.

• batch processor: Yes, though it is still mp3->wav->mp3 and eg. wavelab would store a temporary wav-file. The advantage is that you can perform additional editing on the files like normalizing, which is almost indispensable for tracks downlaoded from various sources over the internet.
  
• hosting a broadcast: I'll have to discuss this matter with the other rancheros/as first. Maybe you could drop me a line to further talk about that - email

thanks for the information about the batch processing. i'll give a ring next week about hosting. this is actually not so important, because there is myplay.winamp.com for free streaming. there are three problems with this service: -you are officially not allowed to share an account -it streams the music at the rate of the original files -the playlist must satisfy certain conditions which qualifies it as legal broadcast

whether we use this service or something else, first we need some storage for temporary disposal of mp3-files.

well, if your looking at a two hour show, once a week then storage shouldn't be a problem. 2 hours worth of music would fit into under 500 megs. that's not that much right? :)

in terms of bandwidth. if you had a machine that could run as a relay server (one that wouldn't have to do any of the encoding) the only factor would be bandwidth and lots of it. bandwidth to receive the source stream (which is encoded on the source computer and stored on the source computer).

i dunno, ideas?

500 megs for is hq mp3s. if they were 32 kbps/ 22 kHz/ mono, like eurorange uses to play to cable modems, an hour is about 15 megs. if we compile, say 5 hours a month, we need 15 (megs) x 5 (hours) x 2 (upload and download) = 150 meg/month. let's say 300 to be sure.

this solution keeps the bandwidth low, because we won't use it to share mp3s (who want mono/32kbps? ;-). essentially, what we need is 50 megs on a server with ftp access and some bandwidth. some of my previous providers offered space for homepages. i never used them, but i will check this. but there are pther sites where you get 50megs for a free homepage.

anyway, if we go for this solution we need to solve the encoding problem. i haven't found a scriptable mp3 decoder and encoder for the mac yet.