Classical Voices

Let' talk about the Radio business, shall we? Notice I said radio "business", not hobby, not experiment, not dalliance or fling, but radio "business". I retired Radio 7 last week and began my tentatively titled Classical Voices station. I'll discuss the tentatively part later, but so far Classical Voices has been received much better than anticipated and I'd like to take this time to blog a few of my thoughts about the experience so far.

Shoutcast vs. Jetcast

In my previous post I talked about moving from the Jetcast platform to the Shoutcast platform, and that's exactly what I did. As I said before I think Jetcast is simple to use and a much better platform for the newbie broadcaster. There is only one piece of software to configure and all you really need to do is fill in the blanks and punch hole in your firewall to get up and running. Jetcast also supports multiple file types which is something I took for granted before I moved to Shoutcast. It's a very nice package and I just wish it had more support in the internet world, but, unfortunately, Jetcast listeners are few and far between.

Shoutcast, on the other hand, is practically the de facto standard for small independent broadcasters like myself. It's been around a long time and pioneered the whole concept of bringing streaming to the masses. It also integrates into the very popular Winamp player which puts your station in reach of millions of potential listeners around the world, and also puts your station into the Shoutcast directory which gives you a very visible presence on the net. If you want to reach an audience there are very few choices that give you the advantages that Shoutcast does.

The software, however, is a bit finicky at times and not as intuitive as Jetcast. There are two packages to be installed - the DNAS or server software, and the DSP plug-in which provides the connection between your Winamp player and the DNAS server. The DSP is much like Jetcast's software and is mainly just fill-in-the-blanks. The DNAS is a little more complicated and configuration involves using a text editor to edit the sometimes arcane and obscure settings contained in an "ini" file. Luckily, there are lots of FAQ's and how-to's on the net to help you along and the process is not difficult, especially if you have set up a Jetcast station before, but the process could definitely use some simplification.

Once you get the DNAS and the DSP set up and have the ports on your firewall configured, the first problem you'll probably have with your first broadcast is getting the the Shoutcast directory to see your station. I say you'll probably have this problem because I had that problem and after scanning the message boards I saw that a lot of other people had that problem too. The key is to make sure you have port forwarding properly set up on your router and to play with the Yport setting for the DNAS. After many starts and stops I finally got it working, and I can't really tell you why it worked one time and not another. It's just one of those things that you'll have to play around with.

The second problem you might have with your first broadcast is silence, as in dead-silence, as in a radio station that plays nothing but dead air. This is only a problem for those, like me, who made a choice at some point to go to a file format other than MP3, because, you see, Shoutcast only plays MP3's. Is that a problem you ask? Well, yes, if you have around 30 gigabytes of music on your drive and now need to take a significant portion of that music and convert it. I haven't done the math but I figure that an average of about 12 minutes per album to do the conversion, I should be done in, oh, about 80 years. Ok, maybe it won't take that long but I tell ya I really don't need this kind of misery right now. All I want to do was stream a little music.

So that's where things stand at the moment. I've got quite a bit of music streaming already but I've got a long ways to go, and any kind of organized playlist is out of the question until I get some more time to see what I've got and how I want to organize it. That's the big difference between us small independent program directors and those big radio station program managers - they get paid to figure this stuff out and we just get misery. But that may not be for much longer because of the last thing I want to talk about today.

Stream a song - Go to jail

"Gee", I can hear you saying, "this running your own radio station sounds kind of fun. Is it legal?" Well, I'm glad you asked because yes, it's perfectly legal under the terms of something the government calls a Simplified Licensing Agreement. What is that, you ask? Well it's actually a lot like the Simplified Tax Code which, as you know, streamlined thousands of pages of overly complex Tax Law into one simple rule that the IRA likes to call "hire an accountant!" Similarly, the Simplified Licensing Agreement is a a framework under which small, non-profit broadcasters can legally broadcast copyrighted works and boils the whole licensing process down to a few, easily followed procedures that the recording industry calls "hire a lawyer!" If you don't believe me just visit BMI's site or ASCAP's site or the RIAA's site and see for yourself. Paragraph after paragraph, subparagraph after subparagraph, tables and calculators, geez, it just goes on and on and at the end they all say the same thing:

"If you are unsure what to do contact an attorney." Well, no kidding!

All I want to do is stream some of the music I love and share it in a non-threatening and non-infringing manner with like-minded people on the internet. Instead I find is a byzantine set of rules and regulations in an equation so bizarre and complex that even Einstein couldn't make heads or tails of it. Clearly the intent of the Simplified Licensing Agreement, at least for individuals like me, is not to simplify but rather to discourage from even trying.

Which I think is a crying shame. I could understand this if I was file sharing or passing out free copies over a peer-to-peer network like Kazaa or Edonkey. That's clearly illegal and I have no argument with those trying to enforce their copyrights on illegal sharers. But I'm not doing that. It's crazy to think that anyone would seriously consider capturing the low-quality 48kbps streams that I'm sending out and burning it to a CD or transfer it to their IPod's. I mean, let's get real. Compared to an actual CD it sounds terrible.

But that's not the point. The point is that people get paid when they're works are performed and no distinction is made between high-quality and low-quality or between for-profit radio stations and for-fun individuals like me, so although I personally don't see how I'm harming anyone with my measly little 4 slots of 48kbs music, the fact is that others probably wouldn't see it that way, and that means I'll probably have to stop doing this and Classical Voices will have go silent. It's fun, but it's not worth a lawsuit.

Of course there are alternatives and in fact a whole little cottage industry has grown around this issue. For a fee there are services like Live365 and swcast.com that will handle the legal paperwork for you and let you concentrate on your stream. But like I said they're not free, and they all have serious restrictions on what you can and can't do with your stream. I might consider one of these if I was doing this as a business and wanted to pay the money for the hosting and/or the servers and the licensing and the legal services and the accounting and the advertising and the marketing, etc..., but aw shucks fellers, I just wanted to do this for the fun.

So, Classical Voices will be gone pretty soon. It was fun setting it up and getting it running, but I have to be real about this. I may still put out a stream every now and then, but for now it's time to move on to something else. Oh, and it won't be called Classical Voices, either. I just found out that there's already a Satellite Radio service that runs a station called Classical Voices, so I'll have to come up with something else.

Huh, between my trademark suit and my copyright suit I should have just about have all the bases covered.