A radio station for planeshift. (help needed)

[SaintNuclear]

I got a few suggestions on how to keep the station from being annoying to it\'s listeners:

- Since you want to put commercials, they shouldn\'t be broadcasted more frequently than ~5 songs between every commercial. It\'s better if the commercials won\'t be PS-based, because that means there\'s a larger variety and the listeners won\'t have to listen for the same commercial 10 times every hour. Another thing that makes real life commercials better is that they\'re recorded in a sound-sealed studio using professional equipment and not in the garage of someone\'s parents using a $5 mic while there are cars driving outside and edited using MS Sound Recorder.

- If you want the station to have a broader audiance, it\'s good to have diffrent djs with diffrent tastes. Just make sure each dj is responsible to a certain genre and the times each dj is broadcasted is wrote in a table in the site. The one dj = one genre part is extremely important. If someone likes metal, and listens to a dj that claims to play metal, and right after a heavy metal song, the dj plays NSync, the listener\'s eardrums might explode. It really is that annoying.

- While recruiting djs, make sure both you and the to-be-dj know that although \'100\' is a number with two 0\'s and it\'s alot more than \'1\', 100 songs last only 5 hours, and only once.

- Don\'t make two streams, one for broadband and one for dialup. Make only one stream that is good for both. A quality that can go through dialup isn\'t that worse than quality for broadband users, and it\'s very likely that a dj will \'lose\' one of the streams thus cutting a big portion of the listeners.

- An easy way to get online requests is via IMs, the problem is that every person uses a diffrent IM. You might want to make an IRC channel somewhere to be used for that.

- Make sure the djs get a few new songs every week. While 1,000 songs can last a long time, the dj and listeners will probebly prefer having only ~50% of them broadcasted. And when the songs are played over and over again it gets boring. If the dj gets even a mere 10 songs once a week while his playlist was originally 1,000 songs it\'s great.

- If the auto-dj is playing most of the week (will be like this until you got many djs, or have the station off most of the week), there should be atleast 4,000 songs in the playlist.

- Organizing the schedule isn\'t going to be easy. 2 hours aren\'t that much, especially if it\'s a good dj. 4 hours will probebly be very hard for the dj and might even bore the listeners a bit (even a great dj gets boring after some time). After a dj finishes a shift, it\'s a good idea to let him and the listeners rest until atleast 2 other djs finished their shifts.

- You should test new djs on the air, let the listeners decide whether they\'re good enough.

- Each dj should have his playlist in the site so listeners won\'t have to annoy the dj by asking him what songs he got. They\'ll go to the playlist, choose a song they want to hear, and request it.

- Please, make sure the djs are understandable. I know this might be alot to ask, but please try.


I think that this is pretty much it. I\'m not trying to give you orders or something, but as a listener, I think that these points are important.

[windwalker]

dunno if id want to be a dj but after music downloading was made legal in canada im willing to offer my music library.... mostly rock

as for commercials... if you do any do them very infrequently, pls


4000 songs for an auto-dj is ... a small amount  i\'d have a few more than that....


as for requests maybe something like http://www.suprnovaradio.org \'s system would be good

a script on the website telling how many people are listening would be nice

Edit:
oh ya and for being on nice cable line on my end, its buffering way to much... once every minute

and like SaintNuclear these are only suggestions

[Caldazar]

Listening to it at the momeny, pretty good. A welcome break to my normal playlist. But, less Marilyn Manson/Korn/Slipknot

[Watcher]

Um would it be possible to add video for some stuff because that is done on bbc 7 when they are doing the kids program (you can see the presenters live.

[dorbian]

damn you leave for 2 days to see your gf and when you get back there\'s a whole lot of sh*t in here.

Ok First, The request system is allready there, it was there before you guys knew that the radio station existed

Streaming with video can be done but that would cause buffers, don\'t forget that BBC has alot more cash then me and they can afford better lines / servers.

Caldazar, the station was on auto DJ so i can\'t help about it but there are way more Bands ( if you checked the website )

And SaintNuclear i\'ll keep your advice in my mind and try to work on more of them.

There are 2 other DJ\'s but they are pre-occupied or on a holiday thus they cannot stream atm.

That\'s why i want more DJ\'s, it makes the station go round, to hear different people once in a while

[dorbian]

First off, I\'m glad Dyari is back and willing to start streaming, he gave me his schedule so that is done, then we have Alpha, i\'m still waiting for him.

The next is a request. I want a talkshow / interview show, if possible i want to interview people / guild leaders about their guilds or developers or just talk bout bullshit ( like we do more often ). i am looking for test subjects for this.

What do you need to qualify :
Skype ( downloadable from ( http://www.skype.com it\'s free )
A microfone and speakers ( i preffer a headset due to the echo that may appear from the speakers )
A decent internet connection, to reduce the lag / buffering

Okay i can\'t request a poll or things like that but i still want to know some things from you.

-Would you like to see a talk show on the station
-Would you like specialised hours like:
Comedy hours, talks show hours ( fill in other weird thing here )

i hope you guys will provide me with feedback.

I am still looking for people to start streaming to the station, if you are willing to, give me a PM and i will explain how and i will help you in any possible way.

If you want to listen or request music on the station, goto http://www.dorbian.nl/itr, to see the request list, goto dj\'s and press the playlist button of the dj that is streaming on that moment, it will be played automaticly.

[DepthBlade]

h00ray it works, good job and some nice music on here as well ^^

[SaintNuclear]

Talk shows can be really nice. Interviewing people from PS about whatever, guild spokesmen promoting their guilds, etc.

I\'m not sure about comedy hours though. What can you do in them? Tell jokes? Nah. You can put stuff like Weird Al, and various other song mockups. But these can only entertain for so long... If there\'s a daily hour of this, I doubt it\'ll last more than a week or two.


Less auto-DJ and more live shows with DJs that stick their heads every once in a while and say something would be nice. I don\'t expect it to be alot, as there are obviously not enough DJs to do it all the time, but it would be nice, whenever you can (and considering there\'s atleast one listener...).



I\'ve been having some really problematic streaming in the past few hours. Buffering every 10 secs and stuff like that. I tried to fiddle with the buffering options, and still no luck. Perhaps it\'s your side?

Also, I think that the shuffle morph rate is too low. Sometimes it can happen that there\'s song from band A playing, when it\'s done it\'s band B, then band A again, and band B. If the morph rate will be higher, there\'s a much higher chance that you won\'t stream the same two bands over and over again but have a much wider variety.

Now, I forgot how it\'s called, but there\'s that thing that merges the end of one song with the beginning of another. IMO, this is annoying, as sometimes the songs continue until the very end of the file so you can hear two songs merged for a sec or two. Another problem in it is that if you want to check the title of a song in it\'s ending, you see the title of the next song wich is confusing.


But overall the station is really good, I listen whenever I can. :tup:

[DevotedEternal]

Hmm... how much bandwidth do you think you\'ll need?

[Watcher]

You could have 10 min radio plays it could work .

[dorbian]

well the bandwith is my sending x the nr of listeners so that might get pretty high eventually.

atm both my servers died, i have to run on my old backup server which can\'t even run the server program so the radio is down until i fixed either one of them, i hope i have fixed this problem during this day.

if my planning all works out it should be up round 18:00 PM ( GMT +01:00 ).

Sorry for the inconvenience but i can\'t controll the life of my hardware :\'(

[DevotedEternal]

Alright, well I doubt this is how it works, but I took 3,182 KB song that was 3 minutes and 23 seconds long which is 203 seconds. I divided 203 into 3,182 KB giving me 15.67, meaning that 15.67 KB is downloaded for every second of music played per person.  That\'s 940.2 KB per minute, 56,412 per hour, 1,353,888 per day, and finally 40,616,640 per month per person. That\'s 39,664.69 MB, or 38.74 GB per month for one person to listen to continuous music. If you multiply that by 50 users... that number then becomes 1,936.75 GB or 1.89 TB per month. That is alot of bandwidth. Note: this is with a song that has a 128kbps bit rate.

Now like I said, I am not sure if that is how it would break down, which is why I posted the method and not just the result, but if that is how you would arrive at the monthly  bandwidth cost, then that would be VERY difficult to host.

[Ghostslayer]

Originally posted by DevotedEternal
Alright, well I doubt this is how it works, but I took 3,182 KB song that was 3 minutes and 23 seconds long which is 203 seconds. I divided 203 into 3,182 KB giving me 15.67, meaning that 15.67 KB is downloaded for every second of music played per person.  That\'s 940.2 KB per minute, 56,412 per hour, 1,353,888 per day, and finally 40,616,640 per month per person. That\'s 39,664.69 MB, or 38.74 GB per month for one person to listen to continuous music. If you multiply that by 50 users... that number then becomes 1,936.75 GB or 1.89 TB per month. That is alot of bandwidth. Note: this is with a song that has a 128kbps bit rate.

Now like I said, I am not sure if that is how it would break down, which is why I posted the method and not just the result, but if that is how you would arrive at the monthly  bandwidth cost, then that would be VERY difficult to host.

The radio station does not play music at the same quality as a 128kbps mp3 file, so your numbers are much too high.

[SaintNuclear]

It\'s unlikely that there will be so many listeners, especially not 24/7.

A popular radio station in a game with alot more players than the members of the PS community never had more than 20 listeners at one time for more than 1 hour nonstop. Most of the time it had less than 10 listeners, at night times it had no more than 1-2 listeners (if at all). On prime time in prime days it had 10+, on prime time in normal days it had ~7.
Let\'s not forget the two weak days. Never had more than 5 listeners on those, usually 2.


Considering that prime time is 3 hours long on average, and there are two prime days, and \'night\' times are over 8 hours a day... It\'s alot less bandwith than you said, Devoted.


Not trying to bring you down, Dorbian, as your radio is by far better than the radio I\'m talking about even now while it\'s still small. But it\'ll probebly take you some time to pass the amount of listeners they had.


Btw, now that I remmember, they usually made parties and stuff on certain days. That was when they had the most listeners. It\'s really good for getting new listeners, and since the PS world is alot smaller than the other game\'s world, a group of people will be alot more noticeable.
Of course, they gave prizes and had attractions in their parties to draw crowd...

[Xordan]

I\'m usually listening for a few hours every few days. It\'s a good way to listen to good music for free