Community Radio on the Internet

Geography is no barrier

Jonathan Mosen
OUT OF SIGHT! LTD - (www.outofsight.org.nz)

What is a Community?

The American Heritage Dictionary, as available free from www.dictionary.com, offers a number of definitions for the word "community", including:

• A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government;
• The district or locality in which such a group lives;
• A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international business community;
• Similarity or identity: a community of interests;
• Sharing, participation, and fellowship.

Geographical communities are well catered for with conventional, terrestrial radio. Some communities of interest within a geographical community can hear a little programming of interest to them through Access Radio services. However, there are some communities that have a very distinct culture and set of interests that are geographically widespread. While socio-economic factors mustn't be forgotten, and work on bridging the digital divide must continue, the Internet does offer a way of providing radio services to a community that is distinct, yet geographically widespread.

Community Radio on the Internet, is really a subset of the whole personal netcasting phenomenon. What it essentially means is that companies give individuals the tools, in particular the bandwidth, but also perhaps useful production software, to put their own programming on the Internet. So the providers encourage people to make product, they hope that the diversity and uniqueness of that product will drive traffic to their web site, and they encourage companies to advertise on the site because of the volume of traffic going to it. There are other variations on this theme. Some providers may insert a small audio advertisement before the broadcast, for example, others may charge a small amount for some sort of premium service.

The common factor in these personal broadcasting initiatives is that they give you huge amounts of what you really need before you can even think about doing a netcast, and that's bandwidth, the shear ability to be heard by listeners.

Say for example that we were broadcasting this presentation on the Internet, and that 50 people around the world were listening. Most forms of audio encoding will allow you to get very acceptable voice quality at a throughput of 2000 bits per second. Multiply that by 50, and you have 100 k per second. If the presentation lasts for an hour, then we have used 360 megabytes of data. That's a lot of bandwidth, and it's those sort of figures and the cost of such bandwidth that has in the past prevented individuals and voluntary organisations from truly harnessing this technology. However, what these new personal netcasting companies are doing, is letting you feed live or pre-recorded programming to them, with a regular modem if that's all you have, and they take care of the bandwidth for you. So, with computers being more widespread, with most containing a modem and a sound card, and with Internet prices coming down to the point that there is now some totally free access out there, community radio on the Internet right around the world is now flourishing.

It's difficult in a presentation like this to cover all the technology that you might need, because this depends on the service you're using. So for the sake of a case study, I'd like to look at probably the most ambitious of these providers, Live365.com. They're now using the slogan, "radio revolution". Believe it or not, they now offer services, totally free of charge, to over 7,000 personal netcasters. They will provide facilities to allow you to run an Internet radio station that can handle 365 simultaneous listeners. And if you run out of capacity, which at this stage very few people do, they're quite happy to increase your capacity. After all, if you offer a product that a lot of people like, then that's good news for them since it should result in more hits to their sight. It's actually quite fascinating just to visit their site and look at who's broadcasting what.

There are a number of ways in which you can broadcast to Live365, but they fall into two broad categories. You can either be connected to the Internet all the time, and feed a live broadcast to Live365, or you can provide them with pre-recorded material and let them stream it for you, without you having to be connected to the Internet.

Live broadcasting of course offers exciting opportunities for the transmission of talk shows or other significant events. For example, community organisations may connect the sound card of a PC to the sound system at a conference where an Internet connection is available, and broadcast the conference over the Internet. By connecting a simple phone patch into the microphone socket of your sound card and the telephone line, it is possible to do programmes with telephone interviews or even accept live phone calls. The possibilities are really endless.

The best way of transmitting live content from your computer to Live365 is by using the Shoutcast plug-in for the popular MP3 player, Winamp. This effectively turns Winamp into an Internet Radio transmitter. Combined with a good playlist maker, you can do quite sophisticated scheduling and programme management.

If you are going to use a modem to stream live to a service like Live365, it is important that you have a good Internet connection. Broadly speaking, there are two issues here, firstly the quality of your telephone connection, and secondly the stability of your Internet service provider. This is a somewhat simplistic summary though because data goes through many points between when it leaves your computer and when it reaches a service in the United States. Any overload or fault with any of the computers involved in this big hop will have an impact on whether you can get a constant signal to Live365.

If you're trying to run a station 24 hours a day, seven days a week from your computer, you will of course need a second phone line, and probably a dedicated computer. There is also the issue that most providers of flat rate or free Internet services will disconnect you after only a few hours of use, and although you can log right back in again, a listener's feed to the station is of course disrupted.

So where possible, it is a good idea to pre-record your material and send it to Live365 for them to stream using their Easycast service. Most of the time, this is now very reliable, and involves no computing or telephone resources from you once you have recorded and uploaded the material.

If you are doing a talk show, recording it means that you can edit it, and add some processing after it is recorded to make sure that the sound is as good as it can be. Audio Editors like Sound Forge XP, CoolEdit 2000, and Goldwave are available at a reasonable price and offer all the production tools you will need for such a broadcast.

If you want to play music in your programmes, or perhaps put a radio station together that is exclusively music-based, Live365 uses the popular MP3 format. MP3 files are easy to create using programmes like Real Jukebox, Music Match or Audiocatalyst. If you are using Easycast, the service that allows you to upload everything to Live365 in advance, they will even convert the files to a rate that allows them to be heard by modem users, if you use their free Easy Loader software.

All this may sound rather technical, so let me give you an example of how my company uses this service for one of our clients.

Many blind people refer to "the blind community". This term comes probably from a time when blind people went to special schools and built up lifelong friendships as a result of that experience. And yet the Blind Community concept is still very much alive. People are drawn together by common experiences, and adversity in particular. Common problems surrounding discrimination, lack of appropriate services, attitudinal barriers, access to information, and much more, cause blind people to seek each other out to compare experiences and ask for advice. Yet in any one geographical community, there are only a few blind people. The unemployment rate among working aged blind people in western countries is estimated at around 60%. This means that purchasing a computer is out of reach for too many blind people, despite the fact that with one, we as blind people are able to read our bank statements independently for the first time, access newspapers, and with the aid of a scanner, read the latest title from a book store instead of relying on talking books. The cost of the assistive technology that makes a computer speak meaningful information to a blind person is also high. You'd be looking at around $3,000 if you want your computer to scan documents and read them in a way that's easy for a blind person to use, as well as providing the blind person with access to Microsoft Windows. But for all that, more and more blind people are finding ways of getting this technology, because they know that the Internet is the most exciting thing to happen to blind people since Braille. It finally gives us access to so much information that we used to have to rely on the sighted to read us.

With that background, I started my own Internet radio station early last year. Most of its programming was of a general nature, but I featured a weekly talk show, Blind Line, targeted specifically at blind people. We'd interview a guest of interest to the Blind Community, and then we'd invite people to phone in. To my surprise, more and more did. We took phone calls, but because the price of an international call to New Zealand was prohibitive for some, we set up a system where we could put calls to air using Microsoft NetMeeting.

When I left my previous employment and was looking at new business options, the American Council of the Blind approached me, having heard Blind Line, and asked if I would run an Internet radio station for them targeted at the blind community. ACB Radio went to air on 1 December 1999, featuring a mixture of shows about blindness issues, general shows put together by blind people from around the world, and old time radio shows to fill the gaps in the schedule. We were soon getting 600 unique visitors a week and word was spreading. The project has become so successful, that ACB has extended the contract with OUT OF SIGHT! to provide more services on the site.

On 10 April 2000, ACB Radio turned on its new services, all provided through Live365. ACB Radio Mainstream offers 2 hours of unique blindness-related content each week day. The broadcasts recycle for a 24 hour period, allowing people all over the world to hear them at a convenient time. We're now getting more material than our schedule can handle, even after the first week, and will be soon extending this to three hours a day. This stream handles technology discussion, advocacy issues, self-empowerment, human interest stories and more. An American company has donated the use of a new telephone system allowing us to have a guest interviewed on the telephone while we put phone calls to air from those who want to ask questions. Our programming is also stored in an archive, and we are now building up a great searchable resource on blindness issues.

We have a second stream, the ACB Radio Treasure-trove, which plays nothing but classic radio drama and comedy.

Our third stream is something that has created a lot of excitement. The ACB Radio Caf? plays nothing but the music of blind musicians. Of course, there are the musicians you'd expect to hear, such as Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, however there is a lot of material from people who are arguably just as good but have yet to be discovered. Because of the proliferation of cheap and accessible audio production tools on the PC, many blind people are now producing very high quality music at home. Our music comes from many countries and ranges from classical piano to progressive jazz to rap.

The amazing thing is that this impressive sounding site, with three streams running all the time, is very low budget. We only broadcast live when we are doing the call-in shows. For Mainstream, we simply receive MP3 files from our programme contributors and send them all up to Easycast which takes care of everything. The classic radio and Caf?streams are simply MP3 files that we have also sent to Easycast. Done right, Live365 can offer a generally stable and potentially limitless solution.

Like any medium, the quality of stations varies widely. Some people simply throw a few of their favourite MP3 files up to Live365, turn on Easycast, and forget about it. Others spend hours making their station fresh and exciting. Attracting an audience can be tough, since it's so easy for every listener to also be a broadcaster. This technology is all relatively new, and no doubt the novelty will start wearing off for those who aren't in this for the long term. I have found though that by targeting a distinct community of interest that is not well served, ACB Radio has found a formula that works.

Resources:

OUT OF SIGHT!

Contact OUT OF SIGHT! for consultancy on community Internet Radio.

Phone 0800OUTOFSIGHT, www.outofsight.org.nz/, e-mail help@outofsight.org.nz

Visit ACB Radio at: www.acbradio.org/

Personal Broadcasting Sites

www.live365.com/ offers you the ability to create your own audio stream either live or by uploading content to them.

www.freespeech.org/ offers free hosting of RealMedia, both audio and video.

www.byobroadcast.com/ is just being established, and offers similar services to Live365.

www.shoutcast.com/ offers a directory of personal broadcasters using the Shoutcast streaming MP3 technology, and is the place to download the Shoutcast software for broadcasting live to Live365 or BYOBroadcast.com using Winamp.

Playlist Makers

www.virtualdj.com/ offers an excellent playlist generator and scheduling system ideal for Internet community radio.

Audio Production Tools

Sound Forge comes in two flavours, the full version and an XP version designed for web media and those who don't need all the bells and whistles www.sonicfoundry.com

Goldwave is a good sound editor that represents excellent value for money. www.goldwave.com/

CoolEdit comes in a professional version and a slightly less powerful version, CoolEdit 2000-04-16 www.syntrillium.com/

MP3 Rippers, for turning CD music into MP3

Realjukebox www.realjukebox.com/

Musicmatch www.musicmatch.com/

Audiocatalyst www.audiocatalyst.com/

CD Copy www.cdcopy.com/