Difference between revisions of "Radio metachat on mac OSX"

Revision as of 23:51, 16 February 2006

So, you love radio metachat, you want to play your music to people, but you’ve discovered that your mac isn’t the best thing for everything creative. You’ve tried Audion, but you couldn’t get it to work, and the only other alternative is NiceCast which costs $40.00. You’d pay that, but money’s tight, and it is forty bucks, and anyway, there’s bound to be something out there that does it for free.

Right.

Well, sort of.

I spent a bunch of time trying out how to stream for free to radio metachat from a mac, and although it is possible, there are a couple of issues. In no particular order, the ways you can broadcast from a mac are:

Audion

It doesn't work. No really, it doesn't work. Hey, I've sat down with it, spent some time getting to know it, and guess what. Audion does not work with loud city. I don't know why. I've asked it. We've been to counseling. It just doesn't work. Audion hates bla... radio metachat.

sc_trans

1) If you’re really technical, and you’re happy editing text files and the like, you can use a tool called sc_trans.
A tiny bit more informatiion here:

http://www.shoutcast.com/download/broadcast.phtml#posixdownload

Download from: http://www.shoutcast.com/downloads/sc_trans_posix_040.tgz

I tried this and it works, but you’re stuck with using text files and your favourite editor. Someone with a deep technical knowledge could probably create a script to do all this automatically, but it’s beyond me.

MacAmpLite

2) If you’re not so technical, then you can use MacAmpLite.

Website: http://www.macamplite.com/
File to download: http://www.macamplite.com/maltx/MacAmpLite-r11c1.dmg
Download the big file. That’s the one I used and it worked.

The only problem I can see about this software is that it seems to have trouble reading tags in some MP3 files. I don’t know why this is, but my feeling is that it’s one of or something like the following:

• The software has a problem re-encoding and streaming MP3s which have v2 tags.

• The software can’t understand the character encoding of some tags. (e.g. the tags are ANSII, and it understands ASCII)

I don’t know what the issue here is, but be aware that Loud City has pretty stringent rules regarding the type of data streamed to them. If they insist that they know what music they’re playing (makes sense as they need to pay the artists), then you could be breaking rules by using this software. I’d reccomend that you talk to dodgy or loudcity about this issue before continuing.

Anyways - Enough of that. You’ve downloaded the software and you want to set it up. Because you’re a designer or writer or something, and because I’m a computer programmer, I’m gonna talk down to you and take this step by slow step.

(I’m assuming that you’ve copied the program to your applications folder and you know how to run it. )

a) Setting up the software.

Open up the Plugins Window (Apple-2, or Window-->Plugins Window)

In output, Tick and then click on Broadcast.

Click on the edit button at the bottom of the settings section.

Enter the following info:

server: kara.fast-serv.com

port: 9320

password: Dodgy will give you this

Name: The name of your radio show

Genre: Bunnies

Click OK.
Leave the plug-Ins window open.

b) Creating a Playlist.

Open the Playlist window (Apple-1, or Window-->Playlist Window)

Add the files you want to play.

c) Let’s Rock!

Return to your plugins folder and Press the Start Button.

When you’ve started, go to your playlist and start playing it.

OK - That’s it for now. I’ll leave you to work out the voiceover plugin.

And I’ll just finish off by plugging Nicecast. I know it costs money, but it’s the dogs bollocks.
It can be found at:

• http://www.rogueamoeba.com/nicecast/