Alrewas Radio Update: 19/7/13

As the eve of the week of Alrewas Radio On A Boat 2013 approached, I want to reflect a little on the progress that has been made so far.

So we started off behind a bookcase in the lobby at the village hall just less than a year ago, not knowing what to do, how to talk on radio, and how the whole thing would pan out, sat at a mic nervously reading out the names of songs and the programme for the Arts Festival. By the end of the week we were living our lives on radio, pretending we were constantly commentating on the events around us.

So much so that when it came to re-opening Alrewas radio for christmas, it was like we had never been away! At least this time we had our own room, albeit the garage in the middle of winter...

Still we had a really good few days and the response to the radio was amazing. It was at christmas that people really started to know about the radio and support it. While the highest listener count was lower than in the summer, there was a larger amount of people who listened in total, and I think on the whole we did much better radio.

It was shortly after that that Will Chapman got in touch with us about the radio for Alrewas Canal and Music Festival, and since then the time has flown. Not only did he offer us a little bit of cash for the funds, but he also told us that beer was only £2 a pint! We were on board from the word go and here we are now.

I have been making posters to put up at Alrewas Show all day, and I have been involved with radio things in the primary school ever since I finished my exams, runnning little workshops and things. All of this experience in organising, producing and presenting I am hoping will make us a much better team when it comes to the actual thing in 5 days time.

Until then though there is many things to do: Today I sorted out some extra microphones and was in conversation with Jim Ralley about the hosting, and T-Shirts have been allocated to presenters!

The job list is still long though, I have to sort out our internet connection, getting all the kit to work together as well as making sure everything is checked and double checked, not to mention the music and playlists and interviews and such like!

I hope you are all very much looking forward to it, and don't forget to follow Alrewas Radio on twitter: @AlrewasRadio and also make sure you like our facebook page for many photos and updates while we are on air: www.facebook.com/alrewasradio. Alongside this, if you actually want to listen to us (which you definitely do by the way) the link to the station is tinyurl.com/alrewasradio.

Don't worry though, you will be seeing that link plenty of times on twitter and facebook before we go live for the first time in 2013!

Thanks for reading, remember to follow this blog to stay up to date!

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!