ds106 Radio….lock it in!!!

OK, wow, that was a pretty awesome beginning to ds106, I’ve been having a lot of fun reading and commenting up a storm, but I got a little home sick for my blog, and plus I got tired of seeing everyone else have all the fun. So, in order to get back on my horse, I decided to create a few (of hopefully many, many more) bumpers for #ds106 Radio.

What the hell is ds106 radio? Well, it is the brain child of Grant Potter (and I think Jason Toal and Brian Lamb had a hand in it as well) which basically allows anyone from around ds106 (which means anyone 🙂 ) to upload audio files to a dropbox account which in turn streams that audio out to a play list that you can open up and listen to in iTunes (and I imagine other applications). From what I understand, Brian Lamb was streaming it on his mobile, so this thing is a go. After Andy Rush and I spent the afternoon working to the soundtrack of ds106 we were nothing short of blown away by how good it was. It sounded like a solid hour of Brian lamb’s remixs and mashups, and it was internet soul music. So since then I’ve been uploading to ds106 radio furiously (which may very well kill its soul 🙂 ), and I was so inspired I took some time tonight to create a few radio bumpers—something I’ve never done before—and it has been a blast. So below ar a few very short radio bumpers I made and submitted to #ds106 radio. Process was dead simple, I downloaded the audio from YouTube (I’m liking Andy Rush’s recommendation for “The fastest YouTube downloader” a lot) and edited it in Audacity–simple as pie.

Rorschach Radio #ds106 Bumper
Download “ds106 radio…lock it in!”

The “Shine On” Bumper (this one is for you @rushaw)
Download “ds106 Radio…Shine On!”

“Let’s get physical” Bumper
Download “ds106 Radio Let’s get physical”

#ds106 Radio Airwaves
Download “ds106 Airwaves” (thanks to the Ramones)

How many courses do you know that have their own radio station?! Screw elluminate, we want the airwaves, baby!!!

What can I say Grant? You rock!!!

What’s more, I will be setting up a programming schedule for the radio station in the ds106 wiki shortly, and this is where people can sign-up to broadcast their own radio station for intervals of an hour. I already have a plan to talk 80s film with Martin Weller once a week for an hour and have a variety/call in show with Tom Woodward. Figure maybe me and Martha Burtis, Alan Levine, Tom Woodward and others can have a show reflecting back on the class on a regular basis, who knows. I think the shows will kick off week 4 or 5 when we start ramping up to audio. But don’t let my schedule get in the way, get in there as soon as you like.

Anyway, back to commenting, hope to see you again soon blog.

Oh wait, one more thing to think about is keeping the audio submissions to ds106 radio rather short in order to prevent complete domination. I uploaded a few longer files that I am now regretting, and I hope to talk to the station manager to fix this. Maybe keep ’em on the shorter side out of courtesy and for the sake of variety.

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28 Responses to ds106 Radio….lock it in!!!

  1. My favorite line from Watchmen, one of my favorite movies of all time (The Shining – I watched it on beta over and over again, almost once a week for two years when I was in 7th/8th grade), and I actually LOLd for real at the last one. Nice work. Did I miss the ds106 wiki?

  2. Reverend says:

    NoiseProfessor,

    You can sign in to the ds106 wiki with your ds106 username/password, and feel free to start making the program.

    Making these bumpers was a total blast, btw, I recommend it 🙂

  3. Radio Free ds106 has been absolutely amazing. Like being camped out in Brian’s living room. I just loaded up a few clips. can’t wait to see what this thing evolves into.

  4. I’m dying to get at a file list or front end for this bad boy. There’s a ton of things I want to hear without waiting around for them to cycle through. Oh, and a player. Definitely an in-page player. Rawk.

  5. Also, I gotta say that it’s trippy when I have ds106 radio in the background and my own songs come up in the rotation. Cheers and princess waves all around.

  6. I got to hand it to you guys, the branding is truly something to behold. You’re all breaking new ground in the standards and expectations of an online course.

    Definitely The Watchmen take for me! Great movie, maybe even greater than the book. Gasp! did I say that.

  7. Reverend says:

    Leigh,

    Funny, i was just heading over to your blog to give you this…
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8c93Dyj9Ro
    🙂

  8. Ed Webb says:

    The Playlist opens fine in RealPlayer.

    Rock and Roll, that’s what it’s always been about.

  9. Lisa M Lane says:

    Good thing I love trying to wrap my head around stuff I totally don’t understand!

    • Reverend says:

      That makes two of us, I really don;t understand what is happening in #ds106, but it doesn’t make me love it any less 🙂

  10. I like this a lot. It took me a bit to figure out what to do (the post never actually tells you how to *listen* to ds106 radio, but eventually I took a flyer and just clicked on the link titled “streams that audio out to a play list” and it launched and simply started playing in VNC Player (and I assume it would do the same in iTunes if iTunes were my default audio application).

    The music isn’t exactly to my tastes, but it’s OK. I’m listening to it as I do this follow-up. I wish people would announce band names and song titles, in case I hit something I like (like the Bowie I’m listening to right now, which I had to learn about by Googling the lyrics).

    Just as an experiment, I tried stopping the stream to see whether the audio player would pick up later at the same spot. No. No way to skip forward, either. So now I’m not listening.

    Extracting the link and doing a search on tunein.php http://www.google.ca/search?q=tunein.php took me to a list of a *pile* of these radio stations. I see there’s a tunein radio app for the iPhone. http://www.tunein-radio.com/index.html Also for Android http://radiotime.com/mobile/android I wasn’t able to find any documentation or download for the tunein.php application itself, though (Google search is just awful sometimes).

    Looking up the file format gives me more information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLS_(file_format)

    Now I’m listening to Radio Super Medellin, a talk show in Spanish, in yourmuze.fm – a web-based .pls stream player, formerly called Moodio (mobile users can go to m.yourmuze.fm ). I was able to add the ds106 station to the station list and now I’m listening to it in yourmuse.fm (still no way to skip ahead, though).

    All very fine, but how do you *make* a .pls radio show? I tried another serach string from the ds106 URL, ‘myautodj’, which took me to http://www.myautodj.com/ myaudtdj, a Shoutcast radio station hosting service. I like Shoutcast a lot – I have the client on my iPod Touch and listen to old-time radio broadcasts late at night. It’s as though the radio signals travel through time. It looks like myautodj costs $20 a month, though – not too expensive, but I want to explore more. There’s a huge list of options – the ever-useful Robin Good summarizes them. http://www.masternewmedia.org/audio_music_publishing/internet-radio/how-to-create-your-own-web-radio-station-guide-20070314.htm

    Still listening to ds106 and it seems the songs are different, even though the bumper was the same. So maybe it doesn’t just repeat. Cool.

    Still looking for ways to create. Winamp and some other players will allow plugins that allow you to create and upload .pls files based on what you’re listening to, which is a pretty good idea. I’m looking for something stand-alone, though. I found some here http://www.assistanttools.com/articles/pls_playlist_format.shtml Mp3 Tag Assistant Professional http://www.assistanttools.com/products/tag_editors/mp3_tag_assistant_pro/index.shtml and Music Tag Editor http://www.assistanttools.com/products/tag_editors/music_tag_editor/index.shtml

    I downloaded the Music Tag Editor to create some demo playlists. (Half an hour later) OK. Figured out how to make a playlist with songs from different folders. The out-of-box set-up for Music Tag Editor is very confusing, as it’s set to wipe out your playlist and automatically create a new one every time you change file folders. In folder view, you have to unselect the ‘automatic addition’ buttons at the top of the folder list (there’s two of them, one ‘with clear’ (which is selected by default), and one ‘without clear’. Then, to actually create the playlist, click the ‘generate’ link in a completely different panel. Usability fail.

    So that worked. But all the song addresses are windows directory addresses, which won’t work very well online. Can I just use web addresses? I open the downloaded ds106.pls file and… Nope. Instead of specific songs, it says simply: File1=http://208.82.115.69:8010/stream – a stream! (Ah, that’s probably why I can’t skip forward). The stream won’t play in my browser (Chrome); it just gives a broken palyer screen. But I can enter it into the ‘play network stream’ window in VNC and play it from there.

    Well, yes, streaming is better than downlading. But you needs a streaming server, which I don’t have. So we’re back to sending the playlist to some service, or installing a streaming server. Hmm.

    Well, maybe I can just make a list of MP3 files work. Uploading MP3 files (wait…. wait… bandwidth challenged service provider, aka. Rogers). I edit the .pls file manually in Notetab to point to the http file locations, and upload that to http://www.downes.ca/files/audio/mylist.pls and then try to open it…

    In the browser. No joy. It just shows the text of the file. I guess I have to set up my server to serve .pls files as a specific mime-type. Not sure which mime type, though…

    I try downloading the .pls and clicking on it. That works, sort of. It won’t open the first file (“Your input can’t be opened: VLC is unable to open the MRL http://www.downes.ca/files/audio/04 – Open Window (Live).mp3′. Check the log for details”. It jumps to the second and starts playing it. It probably hates the file name with spaces and brackets and such in it. I fix the filenames and – yes, that’s it.

    OK, the mime type. Let’s look that up and Google. Looks like it’s audio/x-scpls – as given by fileext.com http://filext.com/file-extension/PLS And this site http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/streaming.htm confirms that, and also offers a suggestion of how to create a link for it. So how do I set my server to serve .pls as audio/x-scpls ? You can set up a .htaccess for it http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/file_extensions_and_mime_types_on_the_web.htm but I’d rather change the server configuration itself.

    In the server, mime types are defined in /etc/mime.types (your server may vary) so I ssh into my website, log on as root, and open the file ( vi /etc/mime.types
    ). Then I restart the web server and try the URL again. Excellent! Now it behaves exactly as the ds106.pls file behaves.

  11. Grant says:

    We are getting some fantastic submissions – stoked to see 35 listeners yesterday. Next step for #ds106 radio: broadcasting live without a net.

    Let’s get some live programming tested and scheduled – I’m feeling the first live broadcasts being a transatlantic 80’s movie review show and live call in show is totally possible using Skype and audio loopback like Soundflower .. http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/14067/soundflower

    #ds106 radio : live and on location

  12. Live no-net DJ shows will be awesome. What about streaming live jam sessions? It’d be cool to try to replicate the Casa del Lamb/McPhee jamfest vibe, distributed over the ds106verse…

  13. Martin says:

    Just getting to ds106 radio – distributed love is the way to go. Awesome. For our 80s self-indulgence fest I have a small idea for a phone in. It’s called “my nang klarng plaeng” – in Thailand people pay for a screening, put up a sheet in a field and invite the whole village, who bring beer & food. So my phone in is to get people to nominate what film they’d choose for their own nang klamg plaeng. Me? I’d go for Jaws, get people to dress as one of the victims, turn the sound down for the scar comparison scene and get everyone to voice it.

  14. Looks like my long comment ended up in the spam bin. Here’s a link to the comment on my blog. http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2011/01/ds106-radio.html

  15. p.s. the dropbox form at http://www.dropitto.me/ds106 is now asking for a password, which of course we don’t know…

    • Reverend says:

      Thanks for the heads up Stephen, i saved your comment and cleared it. had to take extra precautions recently because Akismet has been failing me bit time. And now to respond 😉

  16. Martin says:

    Password is wejamecono Stephen

  17. Lisa M Lane says:

    Listening now. This is way cool. Any criteria for stuff to add or is it just like, you know, college radio?

  18. Reverend says:

    Lisa,

    Only thing I can imagine that we might want to encourage is not uploading files that are too long (like 5 minutes or more). Just for the sake of variety, beyond that it is anyone’s station 🙂

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  21. Jared Stein says:

    Works beeeautifully in Winamp, too.

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