radio is dead

It’s official. I’ve always despised radio. It’s just one of those businesses you know has stayed around because of some kind of deep entrenchment into lots of people’s pockets. The technology is dated — very dated, and the FCC (at least here in the US) mandates almost everything, except for what music is played — that is decided by who pays the most:

Sony Agrees to $10M ‘Payola’ Settlement

So here’s the alternative. You’ve got music, right? Your friends have music too, huh? Let’s create lots of radio stations from ourselves, and then time-shift them to allow playing on all kinds of devices (in your car, at home, jogging, etc.). Let’s make it seemless, and easy, and more importantly, easy to pay all those involved in producing (the artists, maybe?)

Here’s how I setup my radio station that streams all my music at home over a shoutcast server setup…. Read on….

We’re going to setup both the Shoutcast DNAS Server and the Shoutcast Transcoder. For more information on what these do, hit up shoutcast.com.

First, get the shoutcast DNAS server from shoutcast.com. At time of writing:

shoutcast-1-9-5-linux-glibc6.tar.gz

next, get the Shoutcast Transcoder from shoutcast.com. At time of writing:

sc_trans_posix_040.tgz from shoutcast.com

Unzip files:

Now edit sc_serv.conf –> change settings to your liking

test the server:

it works, and it’s waiting for the relay connection, fire up another terminal

Now change into the scn_trans_posix directory and edit/vi sc_trans.conf -> edit to your hearts content

Now build a playlist:

Now give her a run:

now connect to your server (if you’ve got a firewall, may want to enable 8000 and 8001)

for instance on same server you can try:

http://localhost:8000/

click on listen, wallah

ok now to make it start on boot

I made a nifty shoutcast sysv style startup script based on previous work by a guy named spacemeat.

download this shoutcast file and chmod +x it — may want to edit it to reflect where your binaries are (in this case /usr/local/shoutcast/sc_….) and your config files in /etc/

now test it first:

If all goes well, you can:

should start up on reboot now, you are good to go

fun stuff:

if you’ve got a nice firewall/router appliance (or another linux box)

you can add a firewall rule or port forwarding/triggering request
from your router’s appliance ports 8000-80001 tcp/udp to your shoutcast box

now with your dynamic dns you can get your music from anywhere:

http://your-dyn-dns-address:8000/

Now it’s time to setup some shell scripts for choosing content, and allowing on-demand grabbing of ANY song! next time….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 26th, 2005 at 9:30 am and is filed under techno-babble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.