It's time now for some bloggin. Erhmm... Fozzologgin, I mean.

Streaming Internet Radio

The technology to stream audio and video on the Internet has been available for a long time now. When I worked at Sorenson Media, I became very familiar with the Sorenson Broadcaster application for streaming audio and video. At that time, it was only available for MacOS (they have a Windows version now, I understand). Apple's QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS) was released open-source (amazing at the time) so we could run it on Linux.

Since then, the open source world has caught up somewhat. I've been playing with Icecast - a GPL'd streaming server. It works very well from what I can see.

Last night, I was watching the source footage for Amaze-O-Cut and I was talking to Chadd with Yahoo IM and thought he might like to listen to it while we were chatting. I downloaded the Icecast server and installed it on 'foo' (my gateway box) and then I downloaded the DarkIce live audio streaming application. Within a few minutes, I was streaming 64kbps 22kHz stereo MP3 audio to Chadd and we were trading heh-heh's about stuff on the video.

WOPN

Tonight, I was in #Utah on irc.openprojects.net and decided to wander over to #WOPN to see what was going on in there. I had no idea what it was, but had seen some systemwide announcements about WOPN radio.

WOPN is a live streaming Vorbis broadcast. They stream music only by artists which have given express permission that their music be used. That makes it cheap and accessible. The downside, of course, is that there's not a whole lot of music (yet) to listen to.

What is really awesome about WOPN is that pretty much everyone joined in the #WOPN channel is talking about the music. When MysticOne - the DJ of the stream - woulk talk, he would respond to stuff people were talking about in the channel. It almost made it interactive.

This inspired me to play around with Icecast some more and experiment with Vorbis streaming (because it does better with less bandwidth than MP3). I'm stoked about what I'm learning. I just have no idea what I'll do with it.

Heading back down to SLC

Looks like I'm heading down to Salt Lake City again tomorrow afternoon to fix a computer.