Internet radio Day 6: Making music

We're making some progress with the designs, and writing the content. The technical side of things doesn't look too difficult. But we also need some music to broadcast.

Sudeep: "I have the server and broadcast machines set up and amazingly, it all worked! Now we just need some music to stream. There seem to be two options; to do a live broadcast (just like normal radio), or to stream pre-recorded music. As much as it would be great to do it live, we haven't got the time! We've all got jobs too!"

So we've settled on streaming pre-recorded audio. The next question is what music to use. Originally, we wanted to do our own mixes, but we've been researching the copyright issues for the site and found that we can't use copyrighted music without having a broadcasting licence.
The only music we can play is that which we own the copyright to, or where we have direct permission from the copyright owners. Even if we wanted to do a mix of chart hits, we couldn't without the permission of the record labels that own the music.

Fortunately, we all know people who are in bands, or making music, so we should have enough music to play.

Sudeep: "I have some MP3s from Billy and Christian (Multiplex). Very grateful to them for arranging to mail the files out from Canada. They're grateful for the plug!"

We used some CD-ripping software to convert the CD tracks we had to MP3s and then used the Acoustica mixing software to mix our MP3s into longer continuous segments. Because the music we had was all quite different, we decided to do several shorter mixes rather than try to mix it all up into one stream.

Once we uploaded the music streams to the server, we could listen to them in MP3 players on our own computers using a URL Sudeep has given us. We need to include this URL on the finished site so that our users can also listen to the radio station.