26 Apr 2008 | No Comments | posted by James M | in Industry Insider
A good quality soundcard is absolutely vital if you are real serious about having a high quality sounding stream. Especially if you are inputting music from an external source (eg. microphone, cd players, ipod/mp3 players, mini disc) via a mixing desk. Chances are, the standard soundcard that comes with your computer won’t be the best quality and you may get interference in your broadcasts or recordings.
We use the M-Audio Delta 44 at our office for our ‘radio pc’ where we do occasionally broadcast from live, plus do quite a bit of production work with. We have got 2 mono and 1 stereo outputs coming from this going into the mixing desk and then being fed back in stereo to the soundcard.
Looks like this:
The great thing about the M-Audio Delta 44 soundcard we use is that it produces excellent results. We’d highly recommend it to anyone!
There are of course other professional soundcards you can pick up and which can be installed into nearly all desktop PC’s.
Check out the following links for some great soundcards:
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Delta44-main.html
http://www.m-audio.com/index.php?do=products.family&ID=recording
19 Jan 2008 | 1 Comment | posted by James M | in Industry Insider
Our development wizards have been busy yet again working their magic with your currently playing song titles. As you may or may not know, SHOUTcast has a ‘now playing’ field which will usually display the current on-air song.
To access this, we have for years provided a simple snippet of javascript to paste onto your website, however, this has always needed to have the page refresh before it will update. We have now created a system so it updates automatically, without the need for the page to refresh.
The best bit – the code you guys actually paste onto your website is still exactly the same (see example below) – we understand that lots of code can confuse you! thats why we have always had a simple ‘cut & paste’ ethos when it comes to stuff for your websites.
Following feedback, we have added a download link for iTunes to this as well. So if a listener likes a song you are playing on the radio – not only can they find out what it is, but then they can go to download it instantly from iTunes.
Live Demo:
Code Example:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://api.wavepanel.net/P6B5U2OPYWZ0VG1Y/status/song/"></script>
24 Dec 2007 | No Comments | posted by James M | in Industry Insider
A ‘port 80 proxy’ sounds a bit technical doesn’t it? Well, its a very simple principle, it is fair to say that many of your potential listeners will be at work, school, college or university during the day – thats pretty straight forward, yes?
The problem arises when these potential listeners want to listen to your radio station, but they cannot as the corporate firewall or network setup wherever they are working or studying from is preventing them from connecting to your SHOUTcast server on port XXXX – although there is no risk in listening to a streaming server, often un-used ports are blocked because they can ‘potentially’ open up a risk via other means to the network they are often blocked to prevent employees from playing games too whilst at work.
This is why we have introduced a port 80 streaming link for ALL of our SHOUTcast customers. It allows the stream to bypass the normal XXXX port and go via port 80. Port 80 is a port which will ALWAYS be open on networks as its the same port as websites get sent through, the text you are reading on this blog – will have been sent via the internet to your PC on port 80, so in other words – if you can read this, you’ll be able to listen to a port 80 shoutcast stream.
A demo of this service is availabe here:
http://public.wavepanel.net/P6B5U2OPYWZ0VG1Y/listen/80/
As mentioned before, this service is available on ALL SHOUTcast streaming accounts with Wavestreaming.
