The Radio Free Network crew has arrived in Chihuahua!

Read Brian's blog entry (complete with photo and field recording!) over on the Radio Tarahumara Site.

This first attempt by Brian to fire up digital audio directly from the field recording unit to the website, and the content took about 11 hours to get from Brian to online. We had a few technical oopsies but those seem ironed out now.

We're trying for as immediate a sharing of media as possible.

Our intrepid field development project staff are headed back to Mexico to continue our volunteer work with the Radio Tarahumara Project.

Read the blurb on the Radio Tarahumara Website for more information about this trip, and what we'll be accomplishing this time out. We even have some videos online over there for you to enjoy.

It's amazing what a group of dedicated people can pull off with virtually no resources at all. Read the Press Release for all the nitty gritty.

We are extremely pleased to announce that our latest feature artist article and mini-station are now online! This time, the spotlight is on Joe Hall.

We are proud to bring you Joe Hall's entire discography (including several discs of unreleased material that isn't commercially available!!) on shuffle. We also have an audio interview with Joe by our own Brian Sanderson - although the audio quality is rather poor, it's worth a listen. Brian promises to get a better recording next time.

Thanks to our old friend (and regular listener) Tim Crease who's holding down the fort at the Canadian Museum of Health Care for pointing out an errant track in our catalogue.

As some of our regluar listeners and visitors might remember, back in May, we did a bulk dump of a bunch of local music from the Trent Radio digital archives with the help of John Muir, Jill Staveley and Brian Sanderson.

When we did that, a few tracks made it into the the catalogue that don't belong there. We've been yanking them as soon as we discover them, and hope to bring some tools online eventually that'll let the community decide on which tunes ought to be there, and which are not actually local. We might even let you vote on your favourites....

Shortcuts: circuit diagram and Perl driver code and my slides from a talk I gave on the project for the Toronto Perl Mongers and an MP3 of the talk audio (Thanks Fulko!)

As resident geek here at RFP I have to monitor a bunch of network services that keep the audio feeds, website, mail and such rolling along for everyone to enjoy. Constantly checking the computer in my office was getting to be annoying. I decided I needed a way to see that everything was ok without having to get off the couch during my downtime so I built this little doodad to do the trick. It plugs into the printer port on the back of the server - I wasn't using that port for anything anyhow.

Total cost of parts? about $2.50 (not including LED's or case). I whipped up this driver code with Perl (works on both Win32 and Linux - possibly other Unix variants?) to monitor the broadcast streaming servers, web servers and a few other network services we use here at RFP. With a butchered ethernet cable, some scraps of wire, a bit of solder and some squinting and we now have a handy blinkenlites panel!

Want the schematic diagram to see how it all goes together?

You got it!. It's very easy - go build yourself one.

It even has a cool blue light that goes on when someone is listening to the audio feeds. Now, every time you listen to the station, a little blue light comes on in my apartment. How cool is that? Darn cool. That's how cool.

The circuit is really easy - just wire up a 1k resistor to each of the data pins you want to use, stick a wire on one of the grounded pins (18->25) and you're off to the races.

As you probably noticed, we brought a new design online. What do you think? Let us know.,

Thanks go to Mike Begin for the donation on the weekend and to Esther Vincent for continued website testing. We've got a pile of discs building for digitizing, and when I get some more tuits I'll start firing them through.

Keep those bug reports and typo spottings coming folks. Many pairs of eyes are our best tool for making the site better.

After some technical headaches and access problems, we've pounded the bugs flat and moved the RFP site to it's shiny new home. The new server setup is much much faster and will be more stable than the old server.

Although the old PIII-433 has been a great workhorse for the last few years, it's starting to fray around the edges a bit. The streaming audio services will still continue to run off the old box until we come up with the scratch to replace it.

We're growing folks, and we were starting to get too big for those old britches. The new server environment will let us grow and grow and grow - so go register and start ploughing in your content (reviews, event listings, blog postings, etc).

I spent the weekend in the patch cavorting with the Trent Radio alumni crowd on friday night, enjoying the Folk Festival pub crawl on saturday night and then a bit of the festival itself on sunday. Seeing Joe Hall at the good 'ol underdog was worth the price of the pub crawl wristband alone.

I even sat in on pocket trumpet in a horn workshop that only the intrepid Brian Sanderson showed up to. So I pinch-hit for some AWOL horn parts - you know who you are. No christmas card for you.

In case you hadn't noticed, the "Now Playing" panel in the left menu hasn't been working correctly for a while now. I finally got a chance to diagnose and repair it.

It updates every minute (to keep load on my systems low) so now you won't have to keep reloading the Last 10 Tracks page to find out who you're listening to.

I finally managed to catch the track that is just digital distortion (and not the good, intentional kind) while listening to Trent Radio. This was one of the tracks we pulled from Trent Radio, so perhaps it was just a bad rip.

Regardless, that's one 4 minute bit of audio pain that we won't have to listen to again.