The Streaming Trick
by Sean Carolan

Streaming audio on the Internet is cool...but it's not "there" yet. Soon, perhaps. So, in a desperate attempt to be in on the gold rush early and grab all the land I can (which, by Live 365's numbers, puts me 34,507th in line) I'm doing the streaming thing.

You can, too; here's how.

It's not that you need a lot of equipment. I've got multiple CDs, a turntable, and a mixer here at home; they're artifacts of my live DJ-ing days, as well as of my Hub City Spoke Repair-producing days. Pleasant relics, all, but no longer really necessary.

Now I use a fairly cheap program ($25 at CompUSA) called Acid Style. This lets me do the show in a non-linear fashion, to wit:

I pick 60 songs from my collection. If they're already in MP3 format, great - I decode them to WAV format using WinAMP. If not, I take a little time to digitize them to WAV format, either using a CD ripper like MusicMatch or a sound editor to capture a play of the song on the ol' turntable. (I suppose I could capture cassettes, too...but why?) When all is said and done, I've chewed up about 2.4 gigabytes of disk space doing this. With 40GB drives running about $99 on sale, that's not as tall a requirement as it once was.

Then I look at the list of 60 songs and decide what fits together as four-song sets. About ten minutes of reshuffling later, I open up a sound recorder and record all the breaks in one fell swoop. (I use Sonic Foundry's SoundForge, though it's an old Windows 3.1 version - I really should get the newest CoolEdit online.) I use a PA-quality microphone (which could probably do with a pop screen) run through a mixer, which is then run through a compressor- limiter and finally recorded by the computer through the line-in jack...however, there's no reason a computer mike can't be recorded directly, then compressed/limited in the sound software.

Then I open up Acid, drag in the four songs for each set, and drag in the file with my intros and outros. Acid lets you "draw" the songs into specific places in the set timeline, apply fade-ins and fade-outs if necessary, and trim the edges of the sounds that have been imported. You can drag a song forward or backward in time to be sure the segue sounds good, and you can adjust individual sound files' levels. One nice thing about Acid is that you don't have to do this in one sitting - you can save your work as you would a Word document, and it remembers the songs you pulled in and manipulation decisions you made. You can stop what you're doing at any point, save your work, and pick it up later.

Then you tell Acid to render the results into an output file. This can be a WAV file (larger, but quickly rendered) or an MP3 file (smaller, but slow to render due to the encoding/compressing process.) I just discovered that WinAMP has an encoder plug-in that uses any MP3 codecs you might have installed (it's amazing what sneaks onto your system) and have proven that it's faster to render to WAV and then set all the rendered set files in WinAMP's playlist so they can be rendered in one big batch (it takes a little over an hour.) You just need an additional 2.4GB for the rendered WAV files.

When all is said and done, I have three sets of MP3 files: broadcast quality, T1/DSL/Cable quality, and 33.6k Modem quality. The latter two sound as good as each other (which ain't bad) because the 33.6k Modem one is in mono.

Then I upload (about a two-hour long unattended process; cable modem access required) and reset my Live365 channels to play the new files. After I upload, I MP3-encode anything new song files I'd created, and then I blow away everything but the song files, which I keep for my entertainment, and the broadcast quality MP3s, which I archive. It's a self-airchecking airshift, which is helpful for the demo tape mavens among us.

All in all, it takes about three hours of active work and 10GB of hard disk space to make a four-hour show (not counting the bits where you can walk away from the computer for a while) but the fact that it can be done piecemeal means it's actually not hard to find time "in the cracks" to get it done. It's an interesting exercise.

So go ahead - make a stream. I dare ya.