A Little High Tech Brings Out the DJ Lurking in Everyone

In today’s tech-saturated culture, anyone can create a Web radio station with just a computer, microphone and an Internet connection.

Not to mention a certain amount of angst and frustration. But in the end, it’s rewarding and liberating if you have the patience and don’t get lost in techno-babble.

Even I, known enemy of electronic gadgets everywhere, was able to put together an Internet radio segment in just a few nerve-racking, nail-biting days. And, if you go online and listen to it (go ahead, the boss won’t know, it’s only 10 minutes), you’ll get some details on how you, too, can produce your own radio show. The URL is: https://www.chicagotribune.com/go/internetdjs.

Internet radio is flourishing in a climate of splintering genres and increasingly diverse tastes. An alternative to Top 40 radio, it gives both deejays and listeners the freedom to hear and broadcast the music and the programs that interest them on the Net. And there is no Big Brother Federal Communications Commission telling Web broadcasters what they can and cannot say.

“We’re able to offer music you’re not gonna hear on regular radio. Commercial radio at this point has to appeal to the lowest common denominator,” says Jim Atkinson, program director of 3WK.com in St. Louis. “Whereas FM radio replaced AM radio in the mid-to-late 1960s because it was too commercial and low-common-denominator programming, now Internet radio is replacing commercial FM radio.”

And although Internet stations with high ratings can face high bandwidth costs, smaller stations and programs thrive by either archiving programs or using free services. Though 3,700 traditional terrestrial radio stations broadcast simultaneously over the Web, numbers on Internet-only stations are harder to pin down.

For instance, Live365.com, a free service and software provider for virtual deejays, has 21,000 stations broadcasting at any one time but boasts more than 200,000 registered users and 2 million unique listeners a month. And though most listeners are computer users who tune in on their work terminals, Internet deejays come from all walks of life.

“A lot of people that do stations for us turn out to be disc jockeys who also work in the clubs, who get home and decide that they don’t hear enough of the music they really like, so they take their collection that they entertain people with at the clubs and build a station out of it,” says Alan Wallace, vice president of marketing at Live365.com.

But whether you want to just spin records or become the next Howard Stern, Web-cast radio offers unlimited possibilities.

You can broadcast live, record programs in an archive or choose content to play in a loop--break the rules of radio and still have a radio station--whatever you want. With technology, you can have your cake and eat it too, as long as you’re not afraid of biting into the occasional microchip on the blink.

Here is a guide to getting your show on the air (drawn from my experiences), plus tips and a look at how things operate.

How It Works

Internet Radio can work in a couple of ways.

Broadcasting live through your own Internet connection and Web page probably isn’t practical. Chances are that your connection will be too slow and that, if you have more than a few listeners, people might have a difficult time logging on to your site. Every listener requires his or her own stream and server space to access your “signal.” It doesn’t take long for a moderately popular station to use a lot of bandwidth, which can be expensive.

So you can broadcast by paying someone to stream your show (see Webcast.com and NetRadio.com), broadcasting from your own server (expensive, but SHOUTcast software is free), setting up your own station at an existing free site (Live365.com) or setting up a jukebox-style archive in which prerecorded material can be downloaded at any time (using a RealPlayer, Winamp, Windows MediaPlayer, etc.). Public radio shows including “A Prairie Home Companion” (https://www.prairiehome.org) and “This American Life” (https://www.thislife.org) use this technique so listeners can access past shows.

Starting Out: Playing Music

If you want to be an Internet deejay, start with the basics.

First, what’s your goal? Do you want only to play your favorite songs on the Web? No problem; SHOUTcast.com and Live365.com are just two of the e-companies that will help you set up an Internet radio station.

The SHOUTcast software allows radio dreamers to broadcast straight from their own computers. But, because high traffic can chew up a lot of bandwidth and server time, the more listeners your station has, the more money it can cost (as much $17 to $29 per listener for larger stations, according to a recent Spin article). However, the technology itself is simple, versatile and commercial free.

“Most channels we list have no advertising, no interruptions whatsoever. It’s an easy way to contact with a deejay and always know what you’re listening to,” says Susan Becker, product manager at SHOUTcast.

Live365.com offers a more economical solution for smaller stations: By using LiveCast or EasyCast, free software packages from its Web site, Internet deejays can launch off Live365’s servers at no cost.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act enables Web broadcasters to use their personal music collections to do their own radio shows. There are provisions, however: No more than three songs from the same artist may be played, and no more than four songs from the same CD may be played, in the same three-hour period. For complete details on this, go to https://www.live365.com/info/rules.html.

For those of us who don’t read Wired, there’s also a new set of words and concepts to learn. Example: “Ripping” means using software to encode or convert a song or track from a CD or interview tape and turn it into an MP3 or other compression format for play on the Internet.

I was disturbed to find that, although my software insisted that format conversion was a one-click process, the process took several days when I found that Music Studio Generation 5, a mixing and recording program, did not come with encoding software. This led me (with some help from our tech department, I confess) to search the Internet. I found the necessary shareware through https://www.download.com. (Popular ripping software: WinAmp and WinJukebox).

Of course, if you don’t want to take the time and rip your own files, there are plenty of free legal MP3s out there on the Net for the taking.

Talk Radio, News and Documentaries

Do you have aspirations of radio reporting, dreams of getting all buddy-buddy with Terry Gross on National Public Radio? Anyone with a recorder and a decent microphone can do it.

The nuances of intonation, inflection and emotion on radio--hearing people in their own voices--gives a story greater dimension. But it’s hard to produce, especially when you aren’t familiar with the software.

Putting together radio packages complete with segments, sound beds and intros is a test of patience with a steep learning curve. It’s like learning a foreign language overnight. (Sometimes quite literally. I found the examples and graphics in my software manual for Music Studio Generation 5 were printed in German.) I also discovered that that program had more muscle, and much more sophistication, than I needed.

My advice: Start simple. Again, there are some great, easy-to-use shareware programs out there such as GoldWave and Cool Edit 2000, easily found on shareware search engines like download.com.

Tips for Setting Up Your Own Station

The tools:

* Computer equipped with a sound card and speaker(s). Most new PCs have them, and Macs come audio-ready. The computer itself needs to have at least 400 megahertz and above, be of Pentium-class (Intel chip, AMD) as fast as you can get, and come with lots of extra memory. At least 128 megabytes of RAM, although more is preferred.

* A microphone; the better the quality, the better the sound. Low-end microphones ($5.99 to $14.99) can be found at radioshack.com; more costly radio-quality mikes ($160 Beyer M58 and $170 Electrovoice RE50, to name a couple) can be found at pro music stores and Radio Shack.

* “Ripping” or encoding software. You can find this software free or for a small fee on the Net at sites that include musicmatch.com, xingtech.com and real.com.

* An Internet connection, 56-kilobyte modem and above (best connections are broad-band: DSL, ISDN, Cable and T1 line).

* For documentary and off-air interviews, a tape recorder with microphone or, for best radio quality, a DAT recorder or MiniDisc recorder. (For this piece, we used a low-end Sharp MiniDisc Recorder, model No. MD-MS722, $219 from https://www.minidisco.com.) Interviews on the phone (illegal if you don’t tell the other party you’re recording) can be piped directly into almost any recording device with a Telephone Handset Recording Control, available at Radio Shack for $14.99.

* For documentary or interview-style programs, a sound-editing program. For this piece, I used MAGIX Music Studio Generation 5 (about $30 to $60 at https://www.magix.com). Other popular programs include Sound Forge XP ($59.95 at sonicfoundry.com), Pro Tools (various prices, an industry standard for recording, at https://www.protools.com) and Vegas Audio (very high-end, for professionals, $499 at sonicfoundry.com).

For more detailed instructions and tips, check out these links:

https://www.webcast2000.com/how.html

https://www.irational.org/radio/radioguide/

https://www.streamingmediaworld.com/sitemap.html