suggestions for streaming and chatting electro-music events

Acoustic Interloper

I thought about saving this until we start planning the next one, but I want to get the thoughts down while they are still fresh, and besides, it seems we are already planning the next one.

This comes from having split sound engineering duties in the White Room with my son Jeremy and several other great volunteers, and also having run the stream on Friday evening. It gave me several perspectives.

1. We need to be able to chat between the the streaming volunteer and the sound volunteer in a performance room. I think the EM Chat Room would be perfect for this. People on the Chat want as high a bandwidth picture of what is going on as they can get, and what better way to get a picture than to have the sound engineer and stream engineer using the chat to coordinate their efforts?

Concrete example: Jeremy was doing the WR sound for Sensitive Chaos as I was doing my second stream, after Kip Rossner. The levels coming into the stream room were quite low, and I wasn't sure how much of that was baseline and how much was part of the initial piece of the performance. I guessed it was both, so I just mildly pushed the levels going out onto the stream until I could get a sense of the piece. S.C. (Jim Combs), Jeremy and I had been working sound together all day, and I think we had a little telepathy going on by then, which helped. In fact, someone (State Machine I think) said how great the quality of the sound was coming out, so I knew we had it. (Blue Hell immediately jerked my chain by claiming that he heard some 60 Hz hum!)

Another example is that some performances ran over as the other started in the other room. With one room still streaming out, there was no way to fade in the other room without also spilling it out onto the stream. The mixer in the stream room should be set up ahead of time so either room can be monitored independently of what is going out the stream. We should also have the setup established to monitor the stream coming back in, unless that is going to cause streaming bandwidth problems. I was leery of even starting a browser on the streaming machine to look up an artist for a Chat room participant, for fear of eating bandwidth.

Also, the Chat apparently had problems running on Saturday. The Chat was very valuable for listeners, and will be essential if we use it to communicate between sound and streaming engineers. It's also great fun for the streaming volunteer!

2. We should either mic the jam room or have recordings of recent jams available for the stream engineer to fill dead space ion the stream between performances. I guess I'm better at typing into the Chat than DJing, but there was dead space that would be better served by streaming event jams than by streaming prerecorded music.

3. We need an officially designated announcer in the rooms, fed into the stream. Maybe it could be the sound engineer or assistant. At previous EMs Mosc often used to do this in both rooms, in addition to manning the stream, but this year Mosc did a lot more performing and applying volunteers, which was a very good thing. I really appreciated getting to listen to Mosc perform more this year. Also the distances were too great to have 1 volunteer running back and forth between rooms to announce. But, the stream listeners wanted to hear this, and also requested keeping mics on to hear setup sound when there was nothing else being streamed.

4. We need a really good Internet connection in order to guarantee effective streaming, stream monitoring and inter-room coordination chat. If we are to stream jams during "dead time," we'd also need streaming connection to the jam room, which I think we should have. This should be a consideration in selection of venue.

5. We should train the streaming engineer in how to reboot or otherwise recover from system failure. Maybe there should be a fifteen-minute "Here's how to restart streaming and chatting" tutorial for volunteers before the start of each day. Then we won't have to keep pulling Mosc out of the audience to fix the stream.

6. Obviously, this calls for a few more volunteers, but only a few. And it's fun work!

I'll probably think of more after I post this, but I am sure someone else will, too.

EDIT: It never fails!

7. If we work the kinks out of on line jams being planned for this season, maybe we could have an on-line jam scheduled for the jam room next year!

blue hell · Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 11:17 am Post subject:

This sounds very sensible to me - and I'll never joke again - erm not about the 60 Hz hum anyway Laughing

Edit: in fact the stream sounded better than ever before I think, no weird clipping or anything just a slight hiss from some USB device (which might have been on this side, it didn't bother me enough to sort it out)

It's too bad that there were so few listeners and chatters (thursday and friday, wasn't there saturday) ... this way I can imagine that people do not really feel an urge to make the streaming work better.

I think the silence that was on the stream at times this year was bad, whatever happens the stream should not go silent IMO, as I think it makes people go do something else.

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 12:23 pm Post subject:

State Machine · Posted: Fri Aug 22, 2008 2:46 pm Post subject:

These are some very good suggestions AI makes here and thank him for this well thought out critique. I think it would be interesting to walk around with a wireless microphone and interview performers, attendees, front desk, etc ... to make the "dead" time more interesting and keep would be channel surfers interested and locked onto the EM stream. When there are no interviews available, maybe music can be played from past "electro-music" performances to fill the gaps as I just read a thread of someone doing the daunting task of organizing all the music archives from past EM events (probably about 150 hours in my estimation which would make a very large box set). Heck, I would even volunteer to do interviews for the next festival. Wink

I think the notion of a "cue" mix would be a very good idea so you know what you will be sending to the listeners. Hell, a good 4 channel DJ mixer would probably work fine in the streaming room.

I believe the small amount of listeners was due to the fact that the stream kept going silent so they just moved on, as Jan perceptively pointed out. I support this opinion also. Wink

The quality of the sound was very good I must say, when there was sound Wink

I did not, however, see any artist information on the stream, just the event name, as had been in the past and I know that all webcasting software supports artist and event titling. Not sure why that was not done.

As far as communications between the sound engineer and streaming booths, a pair of "Family Radio Service " walkie talkies would also work if running cables between the rooms is not feasible. Less to go wrong to Wink

Well, just a few comments ......

Bill

Johan Zwart · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 1:21 am Post subject:

First of all I had a great time spending three nights in a row at the stream (two of them from 6 in the evening until 6 in the morning).
This year,for the first time, I was in the chat room. For me that made it mutch easyer to keep listening it through the night. I was happy that I could share the confusion about stream silence.
Specially saterday night, when there was a long silence and also the chat broke down several times, I almost gave it up around 3 in the morning. Luckily there was State Machine to keep me going. Smile

or I had mist the Grand Finale. Embarassed

My compliments for the hostess on who was their part of saterday night. That to made a difference. I noticed she read from a program. It would be nice if we could download a copy as a PDF.
I used the schedule trying to keep track of what was going on. But maybe, for us European, we could have the CET in there as well.

Anyway. Like I sayid. I Had a great time and the stream sounded even better than last year. But the "being there" feel would mutch improve with adopting the remarks made here and here http://electro-music.com/forum/post-201410.html#201410 .

Thanks for the good times an keep up the good work.

Johan

blue hell · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 4:13 am Post subject:

State Machine · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 4:24 am Post subject:

State Machine · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 4:26 am Post subject:

Jan, hey thanks for that suggestion !!! I will do that ...... I have also been using their mail client, Thunderbird .......... very nice mail program Wink

Bill

Uncle Krunkus · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2008 5:03 am Post subject:

I tried listening to the stream once, but heard nothing. I don't know if that was because it was silent, or because I had no idea what I was doing, but I agree, that knowing that something would be going out on the stream 24hrs/day would at least have given me an idea about what was going on.

omhoge · Joined: Jun 07, 2007 Posts: 10 Location: New York City

Got great feed back from a bunch of folks who were able to listen.
From the folks who could not, I've distilled these thoughts.
Of course I don't know what the page looked like at the time so I can only pass on what I've heard.

- Advertise it more. I did some emailing and it really helped, some folks I missed who knew about the festival did not know about the feed. We really pushed the info on ThereminWorld and hope that helped.

- Make it really obvious and really easy to use,
two people reported trying to use it at the correct time and they were on the Radio page (they confirmed the old folks picture) but they could not connect to the feed. Since one of them is pretty computer savvy, I think the page could use some "focus" to make it easier to use. Maybe remove everything text and link wise that might distract and make any buttons, links and critical instruction impossible to miss.

- Check during sound check, and dry run. My set started a couple minutes in after a long dead air space and comment from the operator that help was needed. Maybe a loop of electro festival facts could be plugged in between things to keep listeners aware that it's working at least?

All in all a great feature and definitely helped a decent number of my audience who could not be there in person hear the set.
I'll post more as I get more feedback.
much appreciated! - John Hoge

djfoxyfox

Greetings,

I was in charge of the stream Thursday night so I'd like to add my $0.02 worth:

blue hell · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 7:36 am Post subject:

FWIW, just a remark about something stream operators might not be aware of. The chat room is pretty much immediate, but the audio stream has quite some delay.

So when you say things on the stream they will reach the listener something like 15+ seconds later than when typed into the chat window. Likewise remarks the stream operator reads in the chat window may refer to something that was said quite a bit earlier.

djfoxyfox · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 2:10 pm Post subject:

Acoustic Interloper

blue hell · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 2:49 pm Post subject:

Bill, I was not suggesting that the chat room or the audio channel should be used for event internal communications.

djfoxyfox

djfoxyfox · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 3:02 pm Post subject:

Acoustic Interloper

blue hell · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 3:37 pm Post subject:

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 3:45 pm Post subject:

blue hell · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 4:04 pm Post subject:

Acoustic Interloper · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 4:48 pm Post subject:

I had a lot of fun on the chat room. Two-way entertainment!

djfoxyfox · Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2008 7:38 pm Post subject:

blue hell · Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 4:04 am Post subject:

cappy2112 · Posted: Wed Sep 10, 2008 1:19 pm Post subject: