Toadfish Radio - Volunteers needed!

[Aggie]

Looking for volunteers to help putting together some "radio shows".
I'm currently looking to do these based on imeem.com playlists, but am open to other suggestions.

If we have some in-house voice talents, we can get some DJ segments uploaded, poetry readings, other user-created content (Qwerty, I want some tunes from you), whatever we like.  What I like about imeem is that playlists only link to already uploaded music, so we aren't responsible for hosting copyrighted material.

I would also like to see a Pirate Top 40, and maybe even a real-life audio TalkPort show. 

Anyone interested please post here or PM me to be let into the Toadfish Radio Studio!

[DaveL]

YArrr...

Sounds like a fine idea Aggie. I'll fire up the lads and see what we can conjur up. There might be a few geographical difficulties to over come, but never mind, we'll think of sumfin'.

[Aggie]

Sounds good! 

We also especially need some people to just monkey around and help choose playlists to get the ball rolling...

[Aggie]

We've got a first attempt at a playlist coming together - this one's a bit of a mixed bag, but generally Toadfishy with a few pirate songs in there, too!

Check it out here: http://www.imeem.com/dialogs/standaloneplaylist/?p=rKE1HUUX
(it's streaming and doesn't require any additional software or downloads - just click the play button)

[DaveL]

Aggie,

That's an awseome mix!

BTW. How do we do our announcing?  Edit: Ohh hang on, I think I just spotted something

[Black Bart]

HHHAAARRRR, HHHAARRRRR, HHHAARRR...The Kenneth Williams one...Oh my sides ave split asunder!

That be the problem with mermaids...ye can only see the top half stickin out of the waves!

Brilliant.

[Bruder Cuzzen]

My tenant ( a 38yr old teenager) writes and sings for a punk band ," the Class Assassins " , he's interested in putting any lyrics or threads to music as long as it gets to air .

[Aggie]

My tenant ( a 38yr old teenager) writes and sings for a punk band ," the Class Assassins " , he's interested in putting any lyrics or threads to music as long as it gets to air .

I'd love to hear anything he's done....  if he records it, he can post it to imeem and we'll get it on the list!

[ivor]

Swato's Choral Squids done in Punk?  That might be fun and challenging.

[Aggie]

Oh ho....  GREAT idea, although not what Swato envisioned I fear. 

[Alpaca]

I play piano, and have done so for the last eleven years. I haven't composed anything "real" ever (i.e. I've spontaneously come up with stuff to plug aural holes where necessary, but nothing worth writing down). If anyone has any ideas (maybe for short things, like jingles or background noise for announcements, or something), maybe I could throw something together.

[Aggie]

If we get some more stuff up, jingles with some piano would be great!

I think we're going to have to switch over to all-user content since imeem won't carry copyrighted stuff any more.  Heh...  Alpaca, you know all about the trials and tribulations of trying to get viable 'net audio from TOP.  Anything better than imeem out there?

[Alpaca]

Eep. That depends.

See, I'm not experienced with any of these nifty "make-a-radio-for-you" services. What I messed around with back at TOP was hosting a shoutcast server on my own computer.

Advantages:
->Unless you have a weird and completely fascist ISP, there are no additional costs associated with it, since you put stuff on the interwebs using the stuff you have anyway.
->Ergo, unlimited (hypothetically - see disadvantages:speed) bandwidth.
->Infinitely customizable. You can play anything any way you want, have live shows, have robots do things when no live person is there, have data from your radio integrated into other parts of the interweb at your beck and call, etc.

Disadvantages:
->Speed: Non-issue if it's a few Toadfish listening at spread-out times. No way, however, to sustain any sort of not-tiny audience with reasonable sound quality, which, again, is a non-issue if you don't have too many listeners. Still, if you're planning to grow, it's not a sustainable solution. Note that results may vary. I have a fiber optic cable running up to my house. Some people have an ordinary phone line.
->Techie-ness: It takes a bit of setup. Granted, I've figured most of that out on my own, and can probably bring it back to mind, although adding more nifty features will require more effort. Web-based stuff offers a nice pre-packaged deal, but it's less customizable. Trade-off, in essence.
->Your computer: Unless you have a spare box that you don't use in the garage (which would actually be awesome), you might have some slowdown if you're trying to play that 3D video game while broadcasting. When using the internet, the impact on your download speed should be unnoticable. Impact on upload speed depends on number of listeners. If you have a bunch of people connected, that photo album might not get to flickr as fast.

That's about it. There's also legal stuff, but since we aren't doing copyrighted music anyway, it should be irrelevant.

All in all, I think that Imeem looks like a good product, although I haven't seen much of it so far. (So far, all I see that's lacking is the ability to listen to it directly from your desktop, through, say, iTunes. And that may be me not noticing.) In any case, using it does not appear to doom you to failure. If you're specifically dissatisfied with it, or if you foresee problems in the future, look at switching. In any case, be aware that the more effort you put into it, with playlists and such, the harder a switch is gonna be.

[Aggie]

Imeem might just be a good way to keep our stuff accessable, although I doubt it will remain popular now that it's gone no-copyright (we were able to 'loophole' the laws through imeem before, by linking to streaming stuff that others had uploaded, but now it's just user content).

Darren is planning to set us up with a dedicated server...  would this help with the shoutcast? 
I'm still not that tech literate here...

Of course, we still need to actually get content.

[Alpaca]

That depends on the nature of the server. If it's a dedicated server from some evil hosting company, probably not. If he has access to the box itself - well, that would be perfect.

On the other hand, I've heard that part of the dedicated server motivation comes from speed issues. I dunno how big a pipe we'd have (I've heard FiOS tossed around, and that would certainly be a lot, but it's still not a specific value), but streaming radio takes up a LOT of that. It would be a shame to invest in a dedicated server and not get an improvement in performance, methinks, but again, that depends on how much is available to us and how much the radio will actually use up, which in turn all depends on the number of listeners.