From BillyBurg

Heh heh.  Just before the real live person picks up, when the recording says, “this call may be recorded for quality assurance”, I usually begin improvising the bluest language I can pull up from my diaphragm. All the while the pretty music is playing, I’m describing anatomically-impossible activities I would have with their family members;…

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Every now and again, clever audio recordists and producers rediscover Musique Concrete, an art form now close to being 90 years old. And when they do, the compositional ideas get better and better.

Bravo.

If programmers and MeToo’ers had their way, it would certainly create the shortest Christmas tune in history:

(She, singing) I Real-ly Can’t Stay … 

(He) Okay, bye! *SLAM!*

(She, thinking to herself)  Damn, it really IS cold out here…

By “real instruments”, Im going to presume you mean traditional. Its a long-standing assumption in music that, if a device or a contrivance can create a sound that no other device can, and that sound can be organized in terms of rhythm, pitch, duration and timbre, then it qualifies as a musical instrument.

I do not personally consider a turntable…[Read more]

Carl asked if there are any funny rap songs. Hell yeah:

“Baby Got Back” – Sir Mix a Lot

“The Honeymooners Rap” – Joe Piscopo

“Ya Mama” – The Phaarcyde

…and no less than 10 songs from Weird Al Yankovic:

(www.hotnewhiphop.com/10-hip-hop-songs-parodied-by-weird-al-news.11564.html)

Mark, I heartily suggest you Google the lyrics to “I Need Love” by LL Cool J.   There is not one single sung note anywhere in the recording. It is all recitation. But it is as heartfelt a love song as anything from anyone you mentioned.

“I resolved the issue by mixing down the two audio channels to mono (in hardware) before the input to the transmitter”

Hopefully with more than just a plain wire Y-connector type combiner?

Hey Legs –

Where do I find the version of DReaM you’re talking abt? All I can find is an Open Source receive-only implementation.

Mark said: “Rap is not music. There’s no tune, chords, real instruments, and singing.”

“HOLD MY BEER…” (John Cage, Edgard Varese, Steve Reich, Nam June Paik)

“It’s commonly acknowledged that the most creative people are very neurotic.”

Yeah, I am …    ;^D

“I just think that we need to do what we’ve been continuing to do over the years.  Provide an environment in which people can discuss radio and related topics in a relatively safe and open manner.”

Absolutely agree 100%.  But radio stations practice audience/customer retention, as does nearly every company doing business on the internet (“We’d lik…[Read more]

So … what do we do about it?  Recruit new participants? Look up the quiet ones, drop them a note asking where they went and welcome them back?

We could sit here in our dark sealed room and analyze it, or we could round them up. I vote for the latter.

Artie, by logical extension, I could start a thread on Dinosaur Sex and successfully tie it to low-power radio: dinosaurs having sex created more dinosaurs which led to even more dinosaurs. Eons after extinction, those dead dinos became oil, which led to the development of plastics. And we all know you cant have electronics without plastic…[Read more]

Does any of this have anything to do with legal low-power radio?

Do you really have to wonder why members are bailing?

Carl Blare is the cause of dwindling participation on this forum …  such an idea was not stated in this thread before having first been done so now by Carl Blare.

Ow … now my head hurts.

This may not be a good solution for everybody; I’m just saying it works for me.

Some time back, I stopped trying to make one computer do all the heavy lifting and just picked up a pair of junker laptops to use as audio sources. At any moment, I can have the freeware MIXXX deejay program (www.mixxx.org/) open on one box while the other is set up…[Read more]

How are your own engineering chops? Can you park the transmitter/antenna  close to one end of the campus and put a passive antenna some distance behind it? You are essentially creating a short-form directional array to beam the signal straight down the heart of the campus.

Or is that illegal?

If your campus has any across-the-street parking, an annex, a steam/power plant or admin building a bit of a distance away from the main grounds, that may help a bit in “rounding off the corners”.

Otherwise, for a question like this, it might be worth your while to sign on with one of Barry Mishkind’s pro broadcast forums (found at radiolists.net)…[Read more]

Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend that. Other than in-house listeners, unless you have a wonderfully robust firewall and some heavy-duty password protection, expect someone in your listening area to go back up through your Wi-Fi appliance and turn your station’s computer into a porn server.

My own home Wi-Fi password is 26 characters long — in an…[Read more]

Sorry if any of this is already obvious or well-known to you now Keith, but it is all helpful in context.

First, are you in the US or elsewhere? What is the local media scene like right now? That will have some bearing on what you should be airing, what kind of streaming services are available, and what kind of advertisers — existing or…[Read more]