Alrewas Radio Rocks - This Bank Holiday Monday at Alrewas Village Hall!

As previous posts would suggest, tomorrow, Bank Holiday Monday 26th August 2013, Alrewas Radio will be live between the hours of 7.30am and 8pm, alongside an Alrewas Arts Fest Pop-Up Archives Arts Cafe Flea Pit thingy. Basically it will be a great day or afternoon or whatever to pop down to the village hall and have a chill, watch a film, listen to some live music and have a nice cuppa and a piece of cake.

Not that I am trying to get you all away from your computers though, quite the opposite. Because as I said, but just in case you missed it, Alrewas Radio - LIVE - 7.30AM - 8PM. We have so much going on tomorrow it is really exciting and there is going to be some golden radio!

To kickstart the day, I will be taking James' normal breakfast show with the return on Barge Or No Barge in a new interesting format... yeah that;s right you will have to tune in to find out what that is all about.

We have  got plenty of new DJs on this time and Caitlin is one of them. She will be doing a Charts Show, definitely one to listen to if you like the modern music scene, and also want to support new Alrewas Radio up and coming DJs.

Then we have the return on the nostalgic duo: Ellie and Alisha to bring us some more amazing tunes from years gone by. They have 2 hours of pure gold from genres including Motown, Soul, Rock and Roll in all it's formats and 60s pop.

Next 2 brand new DJs again, this pair play together in the County Jazz Band, and will be showing off some of the best Jazz tunes. This is something I am particularly looking forward to, something different to the usual Beatles and Queen format of Alrewas Radio, and also some fresh faces... or voices... or whatever.

Next we have 2 new shows, but with the same old lot. First is the premier of The Great Debate, a talk show where we discuss certain topics and different views and opinions surrounding them. The theme for tomorrow is the eduction system. Tune in for more: Radio 4 eat your heart out.

The second of the 2 new shows is On This Day, where we play music that was released or made famous or in the charts or whatever on 26th of August from decades gone by. Based on our normal decades show, a more condensed and fun version. Definitely some really good tunes to listen to.

Next we have the return of the Legend Mr James Richardson, with his Drive Time show, some classic features returning no doubt such as Cheesy Track of The Day, and Foreign Favourites.

Sam Wilkinson, a rookie radio DJ (did you see what I did there?) but he has some absolutely brilliant tunes to play (I know this because he is the only show who has produced a tracklist, including my own show!). Please support him whilst you eat your bank holiday tea, it will be great fun.

Lastly but not leastly, me and James will be rounding off the day in Jamie's absense with some really fresh and modern dance anthems, something which we thought we would keep seperate from the rest of the day of radio and give it it's own slot at the end of the day when you can sit back and relax, or get up and have it little dance in your living room, to some great new tunes.

I hope you do find time to tune in tomorrow, it will be great to have you. Here is how:

tinyurl.com/alrewasradio

or alternatively go to: http://www.alrewas-artsfest.co.uk/ARhome.html

And be sure to get in touch with us by either tweeting us: @AlrewasRadio
Or send us an email to alrewasradio@hotmail.co.uk
Or you can even make a request using the widget on our website listed above.

Thanks and we will be in your ears tomorrow!

Follow me on twitter: @peachy146

BIG NEWS! Alrewas Radio August Bank Hliday!

Alrewas Radio is literally spiralling out of control at a rate that we can't keep up with! So many famous people are booking us for events with so many famous DJs and presenters appearing too!

Our next scheduled broadcast is on Monday 26th and we are all very very excited! We are doing alongside a pop-up fun day type thing at the Alrewas Village Hall. He is an extract from the public announcement:

It’s a chilled out ‘pop in to the pop-up day', and will feature:

 

• Radio Alrewas broadcasting live from the Hall – there is talk of a breakfast show….! Wander along and say hi, put in a radio request and hear it played on the day.
• Two, yes TWO Flea Pit film screenings in Flea Pit. Early afternoon: School of Rock, Evening: The Boat That Rocked. No tickets needed, just turn up! Times to be announced very soon.
• Arts Café. There WILL be cake, there may be soup and sarnies – yes, BE excited!
• Alrewas Archives folk to chat to and an Archive display to peruse.
• Music A lovely bit of mellow acoustic stuff in between screenings  - more detail soon.

It is going to be a really great day and we also have some fantastic Radio to accompany it, including me, James Richardson, Jamie Ward, Ellie and Alisha, as well as some new faces inculding Zoe Peach, Chloe Gerrard, Caitlin Wright and Sam Wilkinson.

On the day you will be able to listen to us via the interwebs, by logging on to the alrewas Arts Fest website: www.alrewas-artsfest.co.uk and clicking on the link which will take you through to you default media browser, and play our beautiful voices on your computers! Please also make sure your sound is not on mute...

We can't wait!

Thanks for reading!

Follow Alrewas Radio on twitter: @AlrewasRadio

Follow me on twitter: @AlrewasRadioTom

Like our facebook page: www.facebook.com/alrewasradio

Alrewas Radio... Yesturday: 24/7/13

This post is basically to reflect on the events of yesterday and to fill you in on all the latest behind the scenes action. I mean, for a start everything went without a technical hitch, so that was the first thing that amazed us all and really started the day in the very best possible way. Not only that, but it was lovely to be able to be on the boat. I mean what a brilliant way of getting around. It is slow and effortless, and nothing happens at any pac on the canals, it is all so relaxed.

One of the things that was really nice about actually being on the boat is the fact that we had a space we could call ours. Not someone else's cupboard or garage, but a proper Alrewas Radio HQ.

What was also nice about yesterday was the way that people instantly fell back into being on the radio and were able to pick where they left off last time and move back into DJing with ease. 

The 3rd and final thing that I would like to comment on about yesterday was the participation from you guys, the listeners. There were so many tweets and requests and things coming in that we didn't have enough time to read them and play them all, but it was just so nice as the presenters to have that level of participation from our listenership. 

There was also things which we can improve on and will improve on today. For example, little teething troubles with the new mics, and also the operators who are using them as to where they speak from, whether it be too close or too far away, and also actually remembering to turn his co-presenters microphone actually on!

Thanks for listening yesterday if you did, and if you didn't then make sure you do today, by simply clicking on this link below: 

tinyurl.com/alrewasradio

Thanks for reading, 

Follow Alrewas Radio on twitter: @AlrewasRadio

Like us on facebook: www.facebook.com/alrewasradio

Bye!

Alrewas Radio Update 22/7/13

I HAVE SOME VEY EXCITING NEWS!

ALREWAS RADIO IS READY TO BROADCAST!

I have this morning received communications from our hosting company to say they have re-instated the hosting and it now works beautifully, I have been broadcasting to it and listening and testing this morning! It is all really working out well!

This is all making me even more excited for wednesday. It is becoming ever closer and ever more possible!

The new kit which has been borrowed to do this has been really great and has made the radio a lot more professional with a lot more possibilities and options for us to achieve.

However it does all seem to be going TOO well! We will have to see how the next few days pan out to see what actually happens and whether we do actually make it to wednesday all going well!

I will be keeping you up to date on this blog so please keep coming and reading every once in a while to find out the latest on Alrewas Radio!

Thanks very much for reading this blog and your continued support! we look forward to seeing you at the weekend!

Follow Alrewas Radio on twitter: @AlrewasRadio
Like Alrewas Radio on twitter: facebook.com/alrewasradio

Setting Up An Internet Radio: Part 3 - Where To Get Music From

This post is going to be about where you can get all the music you want to play from, and my advice gathered from experiences that I have had.

The thing with music on all radio stations, is that they don't play that much music at all. If you look at the Radio 1 playlist, they only have about 40 songs that they play throughout an entire week. The thing with this is that the more songs big radio stations play, the more money they have to pay out in royalties. We have a benefit as a smaller radio station that we are able to play any music without having to pay any royalties, so long as no money is made off of the radio station. The best thing about this is we can pretty much play whatever music we want.

However, whilst this allows us such a great range of music to play, we end up with a difficult situation where we have to find lots of music to play. I will give you one tip: the more people's iTunes libraries you converge, the amount of songs you have grows exponentially. Between 5 of us, we have gained a total of 20,000 songs on our playlist. The thing to remember is that these days we have such a great resource of YouTube at our fingertips. While a large amount of our music came from different people's iTunes, another large part of the music came from youtube. This is something that must be done in advance, but the best thing to do is to download a free youtube to mp3 converter. This will take the video on youtube and make it into an mp3 file, which means that songs on youtube can be immediately taken and created into an audio track. 2 things to remember with this: Always test your tunes before you play them on air, as I can't tell you the amount of times I have queued up a song on the radio and it has ended up not having converted properly; and secondly always proof check the songs you download. A large amount of our songs ripped off of youtube have other DJs at the start and end, as well as not being a censored as I would have liked them to be. This is a big thing with music these days, there is way too many swear words in them and always search for the radio edit.

So there you go. Use youtube to your advantage and let time pass, you think of songs you want to play and new songs come out, keep up to date with the charts, and soon enough you have an iTunes Library with over 30,000 songs on it that you never even knew was possible. 

Thanks for reading!

Follow me on twitter: @peachy146

Setting Up An Internet Radio: Part 2 - About The Server

If you have bought hosting, then you will have some addresses that will lead you to a server. This is what listeners tune into to listen to your radio. However stuff news to get on there. And that is what your encoding/streaming software does. You will be given a server IP, as well as a link to where you can listen to the server. Both of these things are important:

Firstly, concerning the server IP:

In the encoding and streaming software you have chosen, you will be able to configure the settings to tell the server that you want that program to put stuff to it. On nicecast on mac, this is configured by going to Window> Show Server. When you are here, the little popup window at the side shows you a list of the servers that you will be connected to. You need to click the plus at the bottom and you will be presented with a window with a number of fields to fill in. You want to make sure that you fill in the fields called sever type (With the the type of server your hosting is: This info should be provided but the host), the account and password (if you don't have any other information, use the account name source, and then the encoder password should be provided for you by your hosting company) and the address field (This is the server IP).

Once you have filled in all of this information, you should be good to go. In terms of any issues, the best troubleshooting advice is to make sure firstly everything is turned on, and then secondly to make sure that you have selected the right server. Other things to watch out for is to make sure the right account and password are entered. If you can't find this information, then you need to send an email to your hoisters to find it out so you can use either this software or edcast.

If you are using edcast, the best thing to do is to follow these instructions as they are a little harder to get your head around, and some things may get lost if I just tell you what that says: http://www.fastserv.com/kb/article/edcast_winamp_-_easy_steps_to_streaming_to_icecast_or_shoutcast/

Onto the Listener Address:

This website URL will actually download the live.mp3 file and play it automatically on somebody's default media browser. This is something that people need to be able to click on in order to actually get there. For our radio, we shortened the link using tiny url.com, so that people could hear it or see and then type it into their browser when they got home, as it was for a festival and flyers were being handed out around and about. This however is also something that you can imbed into a website either via a link or via an actual online media player, however if you want to do that, it is probably best to speak to somebody a little bit more knowledgable about websites than me!

If you are interested about setting up a community radio station then make sure you look at my further posts, follow my blog and also follow me on twitter: @peachy146

Thanks for reading!

Follow me on twitter: @peachy146

Setting Up An Internet Radio: Part 1 - What You Need

So, you have got to the point whereby you want to start a radio station. Whether this be for your community, or for your personal interests and fun, there are many ways you can do this.

The first point we need to cover is liscenses. Unfortunately, here in the UK you can't broadcast without having a liscense. You can apply to your local authority for a community radio license, and this is the same principal in many countries. I am afriad I do not have the time or knowledge to go into this, so it is best before you start to check this out with your authorities.

The second step is to establish some stuf to broadcast from. All you need is a laptop, as a bare minimum. There is lots of software however that will do the wonderful job of broadcasting for you.

Once you have got the kit, you need somewhere to put your radio station. There are lots of different price ranges and features between different internet radio hostings, and that is something that you need to be aware of. My favourite of them all, however is Canstream. This company offers a personal service that is very easy to use, whereby a real person will set up the hosting then give you all your details to access you CPanel and your hosting server.

For me, when doing the radio, this feature is fantastic as it allows us to stop and start the hosting whenever we want, meaning we are not tied into any contracts or any long term things, so we can litterally just broadcast whenever we want to. Also in all the times we have had technical difficulties we have been able to fix it very quickly with an email, as apposed to any pre-recorded helplines or FAQs, that never really help anyway.

I mentioned earlier about software. Now there are 2 pieces of software that I use: Both of which I paid for and both of which don't work very well. But they are the best that I can find. Now this is where opinions split over software, as they always will do, but for me, the best actual program to make the radio is a program called Radiologik. It is really easy to use and links very well with iTunes music library, as well as the navigation system within the program being very easy to use. Now there is a difference in software depending on whether you have a PC or a Mac. For mac there is a program called Nicecast, and for windows it is called edcast. These programs are your broadcasting program, that allows you to put the radio on the server and for people to then download it and listen to it.

Nicecast is paid for software, whereas Edcast is freeware, however both work equally well for their respective operating systems.

And there you have you basic kitlist

-Laptop

-Microphone

-Radio Hosting (canstream or similar)

-Radiologik

-Broadcasting Software (Nicecast/ Edcast)

I will look in other articles to talk about video streaming on things like ustream, adn the posibility of a radio station on this, but for now this should get you started.

In the next article I will talk about actually getting your radio broadcasting, so that you can finally get your show on the road.

I hope this article has been helpful. For updates on this blog please follow me on twitter: @peachy146

Thank you for reading!

Alrewas Radio 2013 Update

Seeing as the balls have slowly started rolling for Alrewas Radio summer 2013, I thought I might do a quick update to tell you what is happening, when and all the preps for it:

First of all there is the Alrewas Canal and Music Festival which is taking place between the 26th and 28th of July, and Alrewas Radio will be broadcasting alongside that 24th-28th. We are all really excited about that. We are really streamlining our broadcasting style and trying to up the professionalism and overall awesomeness of the radio. 

We are doing all this in the view to expanding the equipment we have here at Alrewas Radio Towers. We are borrowing some microphones and a small mixer to get us through the festival, hopefully trying to record some of the awesome music that will be about that weekend. After this, we hope we will get a small donation from the Barge Fest guys to buy so brand new and exciting kit for us to be able to go forward with and make some awesome podcasts and plenty more radio throughout the year!

As we go off to the big U.N.I in september, me and James will be looking for some folks to look after our baby whilst we are away,and we hope to use a week in august of pure broadcasting for the fun of it to be able to do this! It will be really exciting to pass on our radio knowledge to some more local people who will be able to do the radio hopefully more regularly and really have fun with it!

Thanks for reading.

Follow Alrewas Radio on twitter: @AlrewasRadio
Follow me on twitter: @peachy146