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Older Blog Entries:Here are some older weblog entries dating from 18 Oct 2004 until 02 April 2005. Go Trent Radio Go! It's so great to see the stream stats chugging away, spreading the culture of Peterborough to far flung corners of the globe. Keep it up folks. We're kicking some serious community radio butt now. Hats off and major backslapping to the Exclaim! Magazine crew running the Exclaim! Hockey Summit. I had more fun than one hockey-starved Canadian fella deserves. The musical performances were as usual, completely nuts. The Ottawa Songbird Millionaires hurt my brain from the opening version of Mr. Roboto (complete with giant furry head, shiny mask and funky star trek uniform) to their truly inspired version of Europe's "The Final Countdown" it was a freakshow all the way. Just the way I like it. The Rink Rock was a fantastic idea. Picture all those little musical bits you have in the hockey game during breaks in play and zamboni laps performed by a live band. Most bands rose to the occasion with tongues all the way into cheeks. I heard the following songs over and over during the tournament: Teenage Wasteland, Louie Louie, Most of the Led Zeppelin discography, about as much Hendrix, Back In Black, Sunshine Of Your Love, Keep On Rockin' in the Free World, and Smoke On The Water. I got the impression that a lot of teenage basement rock fantasies were being acted out in bite-sized ten to twenty second long blasts. Other than the guys who seemed to forget how to turn off their feeding-back bass amp (and you know who you are) the Rink Rock acts were kickass. I've never seen anything quite like the Exclaim! Cup Goalie Derby. It was a dozen or so goalies (in full gear) racing in a figure eight, two laps around the rink, no holds barred. The rules: everyone must be in full gear, including those long, edgeless goalie skates. Also, no eye gouging. Other than that, it's all about getting your armoured ass over the finish line first. When you add the Benny Hill Theme (yackety sax) and full combat goalie action, the end result is raw mad max goalie derby glee. I bought a ticket for the 50/50 draw on my old university pal Blake Jacobs because I figured he'd fight dirty. He still lost though. Oh well. The good old Peterborough Pneumonia did really well. They made it to the finals! They also got pancaked by the Capsule Music team. Even though the Pneumonia lost 3-0, it was definitely a game to be proud of. Clean, fast, well-played hockey. Tip of the hat to the Capsule team though - you guys played really really well. It was so great to see our old pal Bill Batten out for the pre-game skates and working the bench door to keep those changes nice and smooth, and we're all very happy he's feeling better. We expect to see you back in the lineup breaking hearts and busting heads for next year Mr. Batten. The whole Exclaim! Cup experience was a blast. I did miss last year, but made it the year before. I'll definitely be making a point of blocking off my calendar next year. Here's the obligatory team photo:
Once I've adjusted the balance a bit, I'll fire off a print so Pneumonia-ites, keep an eye on the mail. posted at: 19:35 | path: | permalink After crunching all the new material, the catalogue now weighs in at a beefy 1291 tracks. Kickass. Of course, you all know that we're not releasin' nuthin until it breaks 1500 tracks. I know Brian Sanderson has some goodies for me, and I think that Jill Staveley is going to be sending me some more stuff in the mail: once she finishes chasing down elusive musicians. Do you have music that should be in the RFP catalogue? If so, get it to Trent Radio and into Jill Staveley's hands as soon as possible. How much airplay are you getting in Japan? Italy? How about The Netherlands? Ok then. Get off your duff lazybones :) Now we're really getting some good momentum going. Trent Radio breaking 10,000 online listeners in six months shows me what the future holds. I expect that once we open up Radio Free Peterborough to the wider world via the global stream directories (yp.icecast.org, yp.shoutcast.com, etc) our listenership will go through the roof. Alas, we don't have the bandwidth to be that popular right now. R.F.P. has already far exceeded my original goal of "build it and see what happens" - and all the support and kind words we get via email, at the pub and through your word of mouth promo is truly wonderful to behold. Keep it up. There's a new suite of technologies that facilitate more direct community involvement in R.F.P. and information exchange between our listeners and friends about to come online in the next month or two. Once that happens, things really start to get interesting. For a hint and to whet your appetite, these new technologies are built on the Open Source community software Drupal. posted at: 11:12 | path: | permalink Tue, 22 Mar 2005 Steve, I downloaded the Inital release, 01 Dec 2004 last night off the net. I have been told for years that i should have been in radio....mainly for my voice which is a deep Bass radio type voice. I was a voice major in college. I also have done impressions over the years and add humor to life when ever i can. I have always wondered about putting my gift of voice to work for myself. I am not about to quit my day job. I want to do radio in the evenings from home or somewhere. I could work at a station and do my time.. but i want to have my own style broadcast. I have some ideas in my head on what i want to do with the broadcast...some music, some community announcements.. some talk. I guess i need to know what the reality of how many people could actually hear the broadcast... I live in Ft Worth Texas. Its a large City that still trys to act like a smaller town. It is very strong in Arts and Cultural areas.. many museums and its really a great place to live. So what can i really do with the internet and how large can this really be? Thank you so much for publishing this information and making ideas like mine possible. Thank You ! Tommy Higgs --- end quoted email -- I wrote back to him and told him about the fact that Trent Radio has just served its ten thousandth listener online. I also told him that those ten thousand listeners are from 43 different countries. That seemed to make him happy. It makes me pretty darn happy too. You go Tony! and keep us up to date on your progress. We want to see D.I.Y. radio spread far and wide.posted at: 18:03 | path: | permalink As of today, Trent Radio has been pumping out the digital audio to the whole world for 6 months. So far, so !@#$!@#$ good. The T.R. streams have served 7355 happy customers from all over the world. 42 countries to be precise. That averages at about 1255 online listening sessions per month. It's interesting to note that 70% of the stream listeners are Canadian. These must be friends & family of operators as well as Peterborough/Trent expats now living elsewhere in Canada. Cool! It makes me happy to know that I can help people to connect back with Peterborough online from wherever they happen to be. It's clearly something people want: numbers like 1255 listeners/month don't lie. So go check out the Trent Radio Stream Statistics page and see for yourself what can be done with $0, 100% free software, and 100% volunteer time. Insipred? Go get a copy of the Radio Free Peterborough d.i.y. guide to creating your own online radio station with any Internet-connected Windows computer. Wed, 16 Feb 2005 There's something profoundly personal about holding a disc by someone you've never met who you know through their music alone. Especially when it's a disc that has clearly been made one at a time, by hand: scissored out on some bored saturday afternoon from whatever was handy. My esteemed thanks to Jill Staveley at Trent Radio for her relentless cat herding and ass kicking. I'll release the total pending track count once I get into ripping the discs to mp3 for broadcast. I'm just guessing at this point, but I'd bet one or two more packages that fat would push us over the 1500 track mark - and as you all know by now, that's important. Once we hit 1500, we'll release the next wave of the catalogue upon the unsuspecting radio listening public. So get those discs up to Trent Radio people - there's a shoebox or something to put them in. Just ask whoever's there, and they'll point you in the right direction. Fri, 04 Feb 2005 21 Songs for $8.88 - that's $0.42 cents a song. Nice. I hope to work on the live recording Pat and I did at the Tranzac a bit this weekend, in between job searches. If you, or someone you know could use the skills of the person who built all of the Radio Free Peterborough doodads you see and hear before you, let me know. I'm looking for a job folks - sad but true. Something community-oriented would be nice if it paid the bills, but at the moment I'm considering any opportunities that come my way. My chops centre around Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD, Perl, MySQL, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash & ActionScript heavy lifting (XML sockets, code-driven animation, etc). I hope to release a prototype of the R.F.P. Listening Room soon, where you'll be able to pick a custom playlist of tracks from the R.F.P. catalogue to enjoy whenever you feel like it. It's all flashed and animated up. I just have to finish the crossfader and the playlist editor. Stay tuned.... posted at: 16:02 | path: | permalink It took a bit of twiddling the local Perl installation, but everything is working now. Also, we got the Pat Walsh Web Diary up online at Zunior and Pat's great album Burnt By The Sun, Scared By The Thunder should be available for download - for a mere $8.88 sometime in the next few days. Stay tuned folks - we're just getting warmed up. Fri, 28 Jan 2005 The stream server John brought up two weeks ago is all built, hardened, and configured to run all the same audio streaming services currently hosted by Trent Radio, plus a few more surprises to come. Now the server should be much more solid. That duron that runs the current Trent Radio Audio Streams has a hardware clock issue that makes it faceplant once in a while. It also runs at just under 70% of the machine's full capacity - on the new machine, it's just under 28% -- so there's a lot more room to grow, and the machine doesn't have to run all out to keep things moving. Users should notice no difference at all (assuming we do the migration correctly) except the stream should be more solid, and uptime should be greatly improved. To be fair, the duron has run for a month without a faceplant, but we can't predict when it'll go splat next. Kudos to John K. Muir at Trent Radio for doing the "run down to the basement to reboot the stream box" shuffle as required. Hopefully you won't have to do that any more. posted at: 15:08 | path: | permalink The Rock 'N Roll Wedding #2 (The Anniversary) was defintely lots of fun. If you happen to be one of the people who played that night and I didn't link to your website, Let me know. On a completely different note, John Muir is bringing up the new Trent Radio streaming server for me to set up and configure. It's going to be nice to have a reliable box there, instead of the flakey Duron that crams its head into the sand at seemingly random intervals, with no discernable cause. posted at: 10:53 | path: | permalink I was up in the patch for a full week of rock and roll, 5 am bedtimes and the usual schtick that goes with Peterborough. Oh yeah - and it was christmas holidays and new year in there somewhere too. A great time, but I'm glad to be back in Tranah. One thing I did manage to get done for R.F.P. while I was there was to record three live sets of The Silver Hearts at The Montreal House. You know the deal though, no one gets to hear it until we push the catalogue up over 1500 tracks. Some of the new albums that will be part of that update include the best tracks from the live show I recorded at the Moho, Ian Osborn's "Purple Pandas of Passion", Motr Kaiotee, Beau Dixon, The Weber Brothers and a few secrets I'll just keep up my sleeve until the time is right. Curious? Then you'd better get busy recording your album and tell us about it so we can get YOU into the online catalogue, and on Trent Radio, 92.7 FM all night, every night. If you aren't someone who records music, I'll bet you $5 you know someone who does. Want to help R.F.P.? Pester them to get around to recording those songs. Maybe they'd record more if they knew people want to have them to enjoy any time they'd like. posted at: 17:36 | path: | permalink Fri, 17 Dec 2004 The Listening Room application is coming along nicely. The "main" interface is all done, and the search functionality is done. Now to lay out the playlist interface, build scrolling and selection (so you can re-arrange or edit the playlist). After that, it'll be time to figure out how to build a player. Once that is all done, we should be able to offer various types of listening rooms: the whole catalogue, just a particular artist, etc. The whole thing runs off an external file that defines all the tracks that this particular playlist can access. Everything else Just Works. This should be a cool way to explore the catalogue once it's all done. posted at: 13:31 | path: | permalink Thu, 02 Dec 2004 So check out the D.I.Y. Internet Radio document and let us know what you think. Have fun! Tell us about your project once it's online - we want to see what you're up to. posted at: 15:08 | path: | permalink I am now a Trent Radio board member. I was up in the patch for the Annual General Meeting this weekend. This is a little strange for me, since I've never been on a board of anything before. Trent Radio folks have been super-good to me. By helping Radio Free Peterborough get on the actual FM airwaves Trent Radio people have helped the R.F.P. project out immensely. The Trent Radio community has also been incredibly supportive of the R.F.P. project, helping out with promo, co-ordinating with local artists, events, moral support, the lot. It's a good barter I think - they get free, local, ready-to-roll pushbutton overnight programming, as well as some of my tech skills gratis. I get to have R.F.P. heard all night every night on Trent Radio, while promoting some of the huge pool of talent we have in Peterborough. So, it's a really great mutually parasitic relationship. At first, I didn't want to become a board member. I'm more of a "punch away at computer in the basement alone" kind of person than a committee-type. But, given all the good things they've done for R.F.P., it hardly seemed right to me to pass up a chance to do my bit. They also don't seem to mind that I know nothing at all about the way boards conduct the business of governing, and that I ask a lot of stupid questions. That's good, because I have lots more stupid questions. Hehe. posted at: 10:38 | path: | permalink This doc is a pdf that should tell you pretty much everything you need to set up your own online radio station for FREE! If you have a reasonably modern computer running on a DSL or Cable connection, you're ready to roll. Very little technical expertse required. Stay tuned..posted at: 10:36 | path: | permalink Fri, 12 Nov 2004 I'm working up an "almost everything you need to know to run an Internet Radio Station" document. All you need is a reasonably modern computer running Windows with a sound card on a high speed cable/DSL connection, time, and elbow grease. It'll be a pdf with not-too-technical overviews of the technology involved. There is also a pretty detailed set of step-by-step instructions for downloading, configuring and using the bits of technology involved. This pdf document will be made available absolutely free for non-commercial use. No registration form or marketing gimmick - just the facts ma'am. So start thinking about what you want your online radio project to be all about. Windows users will be the main focus of the document, since (alas) most people who have highspeed connections also run some sort of MicroSoft product. There are also software references for Mac OSX users, and Linux users of course. But Linux users would probably already be installing Icecast while reading this anyways. Drop us a line if you'd like to proofread and test out this .pdf document before we unleash it on the unsuspecting masses. It's time to start spreading the fun of sharing your music with the world. I want to see thousands of home-based d.i.y. radio stations sprout up at the end of every highspeed cable and DSL connection. The software to do it is all free. All you have to do is want to build an online station badly enough to navigate the choppy waters of technological failure, frustration and obstacles. Trust me - the end of the journey is absolutely worth it. If you ever wanted to have a 24/7 online broadcast of you singing "I'm a little teapot" while soloing on the ukulele, now's your chance. This is almost all the same technology Radio Free Peterborough uses, so we know it works. If we can make a Radio Station out of nothing, so can you. If you're a musician or band trying to promote yourself, any band member with an "always on" internet connection could be your own personal radio station. You could broadcast the best of your recorded tracks, self-recorded and produced interview segments, band promo segments, live phone-in sessions with fans online, whatever you want. We want to spawn a wave of d.i.y. mini stations in our wake. Maybe we can set up a network for exchanging material for broadcast on each other's stations too. Who knows. Let's find out. Thu, 11 Nov 2004 I don't think we'll be installing it just yet (.0 releases are not something you want to hang your favourite hat on - they tend to have a few bugs here and there). Once they get to 2.1.1 i'll install it for prototyping purposes. 1113 Tracks! You can now make tax-deductible donations to R.F.P. - see our Donation Page for more info. This update features a huge number of artists including (in no particular order): Alex Stangl, Michael Hermiston, Back Porch Delivery, Muddy Children, Nauni Parkinson, Beau Dixon, SEVEN more Bernie Martin recordings (now we have 10 Bernie Martin Albums!!), Philip Kummel, Born Again Pagans, Pipebomb, Catfish Willie, Serena Ryder, CeeDees, Smelt, another Sowfi recording, David Bateman, David Ramsden, Story Machine, Dennis O' Toole, Tammy Lin Foreman, another album from The Diplomats, The Diviners, the newest Gorgeous Georgies, The John Milloy Symphony Orchestra, The Pearl Necklaces, Jackson Delta, The Spades, music from The Super Popular Show, Washboard Hank and the Loud Sisters. That should keep you busy for awhile. posted at: 16:18 | path: | permalink That's Not Normal. I've run Unix boxes under similar load for a full year without incident. Looks like John is going to order a new box and bring it up to my place here in Toronto so I can set it all up. Ugh. Just when you get something working, something else catches fire. Oh well. No rest for the geeky. posted at: 11:35 | path: | permalink With a 1.5 Megabit outbound connection (that's the same as a T1 folks!) and a dedicated 950MHz Duron machine in the basement of Trent Radio House, good old Trent Radio 92.7 CFFF FM is now bristling with Internet audio streams. The dedicated box is running Debian Linux with a 2.4.8 kernel. The live streaming is accomplished with DarkIce - a slightly unstable, but Very Impressive piece of software. Using a single soundcard, Trent Radio is now broadcasting in both mp3 and ogg vorbis, each at 96k, 56k, and 32k. That's six streams on one sound card, all encoding 2 stereo channels on the fly. HOLY CRAP that's alot of math. It gives the Duron a good thrashing, but so far everything is stable. To hedge my bets, I also wrote a script to check every minute that the DarkIce process is still running. If not, the script will trigger a new instance to fire. The script will also log the date and time that DarkIce died for future diagnosis. So if DarkIce craps the bed, we'll be back online in 60 seconds or less. Here's the script for the interested: #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; if($s->is_alive) { # all is well. exit So, go listen to the new Trent Radio web streams - the ogg vorbis stream sounds Bloody Great so upgrade to the latest Winamp and crank it up.posted at: 18:10 | path: | permalink Stupid Computer Tricks In a cascade of desk-crap that would do Rube Goldberg proud, the reset switch on my UPS (a backup power source) got flipped, and my linux workstation lost power. This seems to have killed my X-Windows install, so I had to rebuild it from scratch. Not fun. Especialy first thing in the morning. Oh well. We're all reassembled now and working again. Kickass! Houston, we have BOOTH Messaging. Ok ok, I admit it. I only built it so I can make requests for smooth operator and country cousins from Tranah :) Afternoon update: We had a bit of an outage last night and early this morning Tue, 19 Oct 2004 How cool is that? I'll tell you. It's exceptionally cool. posted at: 09:11 | path: | permalink Although John almost blew up the server by planting it while I was installing a whack of Perl modules from Toronto, the patient is now safely running in the basement of Trent Radio House. Huzzah! With only a little panic and some poking and prodding we were able to summon the box back from the dead. I've had to hand-compile libvorbis, libogg, libshout, icecast and liveice. posted at: 16:10 | path: | permalink Welcome to the Radio Free Peterborough Weblog. This is just a place for random notes and info about r.f.p. doings that don't belong anywhere else. We had our first fundraiser benefit on saturday night at the Moho. Not terribly well attended, but hey - we had lots of fun. If you missed it, be jealous. I spent most of last weekend at Trent Radio helping John Muir set up their streaming server. After a saturday afternoon of hair pulling, the drive we had to work with was diagnosed as terminal. John got a new drive on Sunday, and the streaming server is now well on its way to being functional. Next up, we have to build a custom kernel to include sound drivers for the two Ensoniq ES1371 cards in the box. Once that's done, we should be well on our way to a working streaming server. posted at: 16:10 | path: | permalink Bookmark/Search this post with: |
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