Setting up an internet radio station

[Dovdimus Prime]

Hi all

I've been thinking up setting up a radio station since the death of UK broadcaster John Peel, who was renowned across all generations for his discerning tastes. One possible option is internet radio, whose main advantage is its international reach.

Has anyone here done this before? I would really like to know:
-What equipment/software do you need?
-How much does it cost?
-How technical is it, i.e. is an amateur going to have to learn a lot or face a lot of frustrations?
-What are the issues around broadcasting copyrighted music, i.e. royalties?
-What were your experiences generally?

Any help on these questions would be most gratefully received!

Cheers

Dovder

PS Maybe one option is to set up an electro-music.com radio station - to play the latest online tunes?

[elektro80]

There are several issues involved.
First of all it is not easy to calculate the actual bandwidth demand of streaming. You will have to calculate the actual numbe of streams you can uplink. You MUST have a limit.. if not you will simply choke the service to death.

I have tried to set up some streaming services for this site together with mosc, but it seems that my ISP has a pretty weird route to the US. Sometimes it plays fine.. and sometimes not.. I want to test this again.. probably setting up new service rules for the bandwith management and try broadcasting on specific days.. like friday to sunday or something like that.

A modern PC or mac can be an excellent server, but you might have to upgrade disks and RAM.

You must be aware that true packet streaming/ internet broadcasting is an extremely expensive service. An alternative is to not use realtime broadcasting but rather m3u playlists off some server somewhere that supports packet stream,ing of m3u referenced files.

However, the most important issue here is rights management. If you actually are going to set up a radio service on the net, then you will have to clear the rights for absolutely everything you will be broadcasting. Different rules apply in different countries. There are a lot of national/international agreements set up between the various right managment orgs. There is no way to get around this. Right now it is inexpensive to do internet streaming from Norway. The rates are pretty low, but here you pay for every "channel" you broadcast.

A popular way to do hobbyist streaming is to uplink your live radio channel to a mirror. Is 365Live still around?

Also.. be aware that standard .m3u "streaming... as in playlists.. is not a true radio style service.. but actually a file download service. some servers do however provide a kind of realtime packet download of m3u referenced files.. but in essence this is donwloading. You wouldn´t want to put songs by major acts in your m3u list that "streams" from your private web server. A lot of people are getting away with it, but IF the RIAA stormtroopers catch you, chanches are that your life is destroyed.. forever. You see, files put online this way are not covered by the various "radio" agreements.. but is simply free distribution of copyrighted material.. which is defined as piracy these days.

[Mohoyoho]

Live 365 is still around. I listen to it frequently.

http://live365.com/index.live

[paul e.]

elektro 80 sums up the issue well...

and yup, live365 is great fun....

[diskonext]

And even the radio-broadcasters are forced to pay some monthly fees to various rights-maintainers, if I remember correctly.

An ideal solution for both problems (bandwidth and rights) is p2p-radio. Have a google for it, there are lots of alternatives. It's a bit harder to get listeners, but they all join in to up your bandwidth, becoming relays themselves. The source is harder to ascertain, and the initial cost and monthly costs are low enough to take a little leap of faith.

I'm not sure if you have to pay for music if you have written permissions from the owner of the copyright.

I'd say you should not worry about rights as long as you think you are offering added value for both the listener and the producer of the music. Added value for the producer being advertisement/recognition and the added value for the listener would be enjoyment/education.

Go pirate

-diskonext

[Dovdimus Prime]

Cheers for all the advice so far guys. Keep it coming!

Thanks in particular to Elektro, who really seems to know his shiznat. Unfortunately, he's highlighted how little I know mine, so I'm gonna have to do some research just to understand that post!!!

Looked at Live365. 15 dollars a month to get max 10 listeners to a live broadcast, and you have to accept adverts!!! I don't think so...

Having a look at Shoutcast. Need to read and digest. Anyone got any experience with this one?

I'm not going to mess around with broadcasting copyright music. It's just not worth it for someone who just wants to lark around on radio playing good tunes. Either I find some provider that gives me rights to broadcast music, or I'm not playing published music.

[diskonext]

Not to persuade you to go illegal, but, especially since you are not a US resident, you could always stop after the first cease-and-desist letter you receive from any of the stakeholders.

As long as you can morally justify your actions (see my first post), of course

-diskonext

[elektro80]

I am currently discussing mirroring for electro-music content with various friends who have resources. By resources I mean gigabit backbone connections and a budget to spend. just a matter of getting what we do accepted as art.



Do not attempt piracy! You can possibly get away with it, but if you don´t then your life is over.
On the bright side, in norway the flat fee for internet radio music content is something like 100 euro a month ( the last time I checked ). You have to report what you play, but the fee is flat and low.. well.. there is of course a matter of number of listeners etc. but at least a year ago it was far less expensive to stream copyrighted material from Norway compared to the US.

[mosc]

I've been working and working on this to integrate here on electro-music.com. I'm still working on maintenance type of stuff trying to get the site upgraded and hopefully get rid of the long delays during postings. Aftger that I have alot of great ideas how to do this.

This would be more along the lines of the m3u playlists, but integrated into the forum.

If anyone has serious PHP programming skills and wants to work on this, please let me know.

Elektro80 and I want to have some realtime streaming setup so we can stream from electro-music 2005.

If anyone has an Linux servers with bandwidth, please let me know via PM or something.

[mosc]

OH, I must say I'm considering just music that is not commercial or copyrighted by someone other than the poster. I'm not interested in replacing radio programs or paying ASCAP or BMI royalties.

[blue hell]

From a techbical perspective:

Setting up the free Apple Darwin streaming server is not too hard to do - on XP it wasn't.

Some things I ran into :

- Be sure to first install active perl.

- Mount points must have another name than the stream name,.

- the IP to connect can be http://your.domain.com:8000/mountpoint - instead of port 800 7070 seems to work as well. Still this IP has to go into a PLS or M3U playlist. This was not documented very well.

M3U playlists seem to have better compatibility than PLS. _ I can't get PLS working for a live stream using the combination of Mozillla and Apple QuickTime (as an embedded player). I've been testing with IE, Mozilla, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, Apple QuickTime, PLS and M3u playlists. All using mp3 files only.

Currently I'm experimenting with embedding players into web pages, this is horror :-)

Next thing to do is make a live stream, I hope to be able to use shoutcast for that, using Darwin as a redistributer.

Shoutcast BTW was not very hard to set up either on windows XP.

I've got a limited badwidth and a monthly 250 MB data limit so unfortumately II'm not ale to publish my experimtation URL.

Jan.

[paul e.]

mosc..

maybe this will help

http://www.turnstyle.com/andromeda/PersonalEdition.asp

[elektro80]

I am discussing mirror server access at the moment with friends. We will need some serious bandwidth.

[mosc]

Paul - Thanks for the link. I've looked at Andromeda before. It looks pretty good except it only supports files hosted on the source server, and it costs money. $495 for the professional version.

Jan - When you set up the Darwin Streaming Server, were you able to multicast uplinks from your PC? If so, what software did you use on the PC. Would it be possible to stream live events, assuming the server was on a network capable of supporting the bandwidth?

[blue hell]

[blue hell]

I hacked up a quick player demo page at http://home.hccnet.nl/j.punter/player_demo/

This is a demo page for EM only, there are no links to it but the one above. This not an atempt to steal or hijack anyone's music. The music is not on my site, there are just some links and dynamics I made to this (EM) site, a wrapper.

Not withstanding this, if anyone has a problem with the page I'll remove it or change it.

This uses the html starters I mentioned before. The links are through the EM PHP system, I'm sort of amazed but this seems to work.

The code for the site can be downloaded from the site itself, I tried to make it human readable.

I'd like to see some reactions on what works and what doesn't and under what conditions etc., especially from Macintosh users.

Hope it's usefull for someone.

Jan.

[mosc]

Very cool, Jan...