Record streaming radio shows to your computer with streamWriter

We recently became aware of a powerful tool for the streaming radio broadcaster and listener alike – streamWriter the streaming radio recorder. This tool allows you to record and archive your own radio shows or record a radio show on another station for later listening. Have a favorite London dubstep radio show that is only on Friday nights? Don’t like having to listen at 4am? Just use this tool to record and “time-shift” the show so you can listen at your convenience. Pretty cool!

streamwriter_scheduled To use streamWriter you need to have the streaming URL of the shoutcast server for the radio station you want to record. For our demo we used the stream from The Classic Rock Vault – http://199.180.72.2:8194. Once you enter that into streamWriter it automatically connects to the stream and starts recording. It’s that easy! If you don’t want to record the show right away you can right-click on the station and just “play” the stream until you hit the record button.

To schedule a future recording just right-click on the station name and choose “Setup scheduled recordings” to pick a time range – save the scheduled recording and it will run automatically… just make sure you leave your computer on!

Another great feature is that streamWriter allows you to record only certain songs with certain titles from the streams you choose. When that song starts up – streamWriter automatically starts to record it. Just add that song title in the “wishlist” area of the application.

We are very impressed with streamWriter and have added it to our Streaming Radio Toolbox that no broadcaster or listener should be without. Developed in Germany by Alexander Nottelmann – we look forward to seeing this tool grow and expand – there are also German language packs if you Sprechenzie Deutsch. Download streamWriter for free here and please let us know what you think about this tool.

Happy Streaming!

streamwriter_ui

Social Media Tips for Your Streaming Radio Station – part 3 – Google Alerts

When you launch your radio station you will be eager to attract new listeners and engage your audience. Nothing is more rewarding to a broadcaster or a D.J. than hearing your listeners love the music and programming you are selecting.

Some stations set up a chat application on their sites where DJs can interact directly with their listeners – this is great real-time feedback and certainly fun for both broadcaster and DJ.

Most stations set up a contact form where listeners and others can get in touch with compliments, complaints or (many times) spam.

If you have followed our advice in our previous social media tips for radio stations posts then you have a twitter account and facebook account. You can look at  your number of followers on twitter and the number of members / likes your facebook page has to get an idea of your reach and reputation.

But there is another tool we can use to monitor how  your station is seen, shared and mentioned out on the web. Google Alerts! Google Alerts offer an easy way to get notified if any search term you choose is newly added to their index – you can be the first to know if someone mentions your radio station on their blog, in a comment or anywhere else on the web.

If you don’t have a Google account – you will need to get one to leverage Google Alerts. Visit this page to get started.

Here you will see a simple interface to start setting up alerts provided:

Configure the alerts to monitor your station name – if  you have a long station name then choose several alerts to cover all the options. You can always disable alerts if you are getting duplicate results.

Soon you can start receiving daily emails with any new mentions of your station in near real-time. An example email about streamfinder.com is below:

We hope all broadcasters will sign up for google alerts – they are an excellent tool for the following jobs:

  • Identifying fans
  • Identifying backlinks to your station page
  • Reputation management
  • Responding to criticism

That’s all for this installment of social media tips for  your streaming radio station.

 

Internet Radio Station Data API Announced

StreamFinder.com has been gathering, listing and promoting internet radio since 2005. We have seen thousands of internet radio stations come and go but have been steadily growing along with the whole internet radio industry.

In early May we announced our new API that will allow software, app and hardware developers to be able to hook into our 10,000+ station database and provide accurate data about streaming radio stations.

We love internet radio. The same way we love pears. Smaller stations are delicious, juicy and ripe one day, then dead, rotten and 404 the next. We constantly clean our data to avoid serving up dead radio stations while also working to provide “long-tail” independent programming. It is a struggle but it is key to our mission.

get radio station data for your application or device
get radio station data for your application or device

We provide a free ‘development’ API to allow programmers access to our data models and create ‘sandbox’ solutions.

We also have a commercial API – this is used for customers who want to offer a commercial application, device or solution to their customers. Pricing available on request.

More can be seen here: http://streamfinder.com/internet-radio-api/

Social Media Best Practices For Your Radio Station – Part 2 – Twitter

In part 1 of this series we discussed using facebook as a tool to push visitors to your radio station. Setting up a facebook page for your station allows a station manager to network within the facebook environment and generate new listeners and visits for their online radio station. And adding facebook “like” widgets to your radio station site will help visitors “vote” for your site by liking it and thereby promote it to their facebook networks.

Part 2 of this series discusses twitter and how a station manager can use it to gain listeners and visits. If you are not familiar with twitter then you might want to read this article – twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows people, web services and applications the ability to convey 140 character messages about what they are up to now.

There are two main ways a radio station can use twitter and each requires its own twitter account. So head on over to twitter and sign up for two different accounts. The first account will contain a stream of your ‘now playing’ song titles that will update as songs change in your broadcast. This will be populated automatically by a php script – details below. You can call that “station name_nowplaying”.

The other account is a more custom news stream from the station that will allow a station manager to promote station artists, events and contests. Few twitter followers will want to be updated on *every* song you are playing and will sometimes unfollow you as the song stream data can be annoying and clog their stream. By having this second account set up – a follower can still get good news and updates from their favorite stations without having to get song by song updates as well. By splitting these up – we make sure your news and retweets and recommendations do not get lost in the ever updating stream of now playing song title tweets.

So now that you have the two account set up – you will need to manage them. We recommend hootsuite or tweetdeck. Each of these applications has a free level and a premium level. The free level is fine for most uses. These programs can offer some great benefits:
• You can set up multiple accounts on each and easily manage them on the same screen.
• You can “pre-tweet” your news so that tweets will go out on your schedule
• You can set up searches for keywords relevant to your station and easily retweet and follow other users

To connect twitter and shoutcast you will need a php script and some help from your webmaster. Here are the steps to get it started:

Here is a link to the first twitter to shoutcast connection script
Shoutcast to Twitter Now Playing Connector (4693)

1. Register a new app at http://dev.twitter.com/apps/new
2. Fill in tokens and server info in twitter.php
3. Upload title.txt, twitter.php, EpiCurl.php, EpiOAuth.php, and EpiTwitter.php to your webserver IN THE SAME FOLDER!
4. Make sure that title.txt is writable (chmod 777)
5. Visit twitter.php in your browser or setup a cron job (explained earlier in this thread)

Here is a second script
SAM Shoutcast to Twitter Now Playing Connector (2730)

Both scripts came from the shoutcast community and any questions can be posted here in the shoutcast forum.

In closing – use twitter to follow radio stations, internet radio news sources and artists you like. Post your own news on twitter to keep your followers up to date on your news and set up a second twitter account to link in to your shoutcast “now playing” data.

Next time we will discuss twitter techniques and marketing ideas to help attract new listeners and keep your current listeners engaged.

Social Media Best Practices For Your Radio Station – Part 1 – Facebook

This post is meant to be a starting point for discussing some of the techniques that internet radio stations can use to harness the power of social media to drive traffic to their site and listeners to their streaming servers. This is not an exhaustive list of techniques – but this should be a good starting place for a radio station director or manager. Although these steps take time and each one of them requires some ongoing management time – you can be sure that each step will give you more exposure and in turn will lead to more listeners and visitors.

Let’s start with the social media darling – facebook.

It is a very good idea to set up a fan page for your radio station on facebook. This would be a different account from your own personal account – trust me on this – it may seem like an easy thing to just create a page using your personal account but you will want to keep things separate down the line.

1) Create new facebook account for your station manager “persona”.

2) Under “home” link on facebook click down on the left “more” link to show “Ads and Pages” link – click it

3) Up top you can now click the “+ Create a Page” button

4) On the next screen you are asked to choose a community page or official page – since you want to manage this 100% choose “official page” and name it in such a way that it describes your radio station. So many people think the world knows what “B96 FM” means. It doesn’t mean anything. BUT “B96 FM – Dance Hits and Top 40 – Chicago” says a lot more. Be descriptive with your page (and station) name.

5) Fill in all of the information about your radio station. And this is important – create a logo image. Don’t use that header image – don’t make the text unreadable – hire your graphic designer back and pay them $50 to do this the right way. You get a 200×600 logo and it will be cropped to 50×50 for your posts. Here is a good article that discusses how to create a good logo for your streaming radio station.

6) Once you save your page you can start to promote it. Under the page menu on the left go to “marketing” section and grab the code for “get a badge” and “Add a Like Box to Your Website”. Add both of these to each page of your radio station website. If you don’t have a website then consider making one using a service like ning.com or wordpress.com or squarespace.com

7) The “facebook badge” will display the status of your group – a short description of the group and your logo image as well as the number of fans. There are a lot of options available for the badge but we recommend using the “Add a link box” code instead of badge code if you just have to pick one.

8) The “linkbox” will add a “like” button and a photobox of all people who like your station – very easy to use – we recommend this one if you just have room for one on your site. The like button is a way for people to “vote” for your radio station.

9) Once your website is set up with your facebook widgets you can start to ask your listeners to “like our station on facebook”…

This concludes part 1 of our facebook tutorial for internet radio stations – think of facebook as another receptor for listeners to join your station. Looking ahead to part 2 we will discuss twitter and how to use that with your radio station – this will include a set of scripts that will read your server “now playing” data and update your twitter feed with that information.

Happy Streaming!

Start a Free Streaming Radio Station – Internet Radio Tutorial

setting up an internet radio station – introduction to streaming radio

streaming radio microphone

create your own internet radio station for under a $100 and start playing your favorite music, discussing your favorite subjects and broadcast whatever you want

If you love music and want to broadcast yourself then you need to make a radio station. Streaming radio station software is very powerful,

usually free and allows you a lot of freedom to configure your station the way you want. In this tutorial we will go over the setup of our own radio station. dubradio.servemp3.com.

Just a quick overview of how I set up my internet radio station.

Each of these areas will be addressed separately later on in this tutorial:

streaming radio speaker

  • HP-ePC with a 125GB drive and about 500MB of RAM (overkill)
  • Zara Radio – my audio “player” a radio automation software package allowing me to queue up songs – ads – teasers and jump in with the MIC whenever I want. And the price is nice at FREE.
  • EdCast3 is the audio processor that takes the audio from Zara and encodes it to send to the streaming server
  • IceCast 2 is my audio server – serves MP3, MP3 AAC+, OGG and other formats – very low CPU use compared to other solutions
  • UltraVNC is used so we don’t need a monitor hooked up – I can use remote desktop to manage my radio station box hidden on my bookshelf – makes it nice to stash away on my bookshelf.
  • noIP.com to map a domain name ( dubradio.servemp3.com) to my computer – I have cable so my IP address is dynamic – the noIP.com service sends a ‘heartbeat’ signal that detects when my IP address changes – if it changes they re-route incoming traffic to my NEW ip address. Pretty coo!
  • lightHTTPD for Windows – a light webserver to serve up your radio station web site.
  • PHP – a dynamic programming language module because I love PHP.
  • ClamWIN anti-virus to keep the radio station box clean and that’s about it.

Except for the HP e-PC all of the above is free. But please – donate to the projects to keep them alive.

10 Free Christmas Radio Stations – Free Holiday Streaming Radio!

 

Here we are again with another great Holiday season upon us. Nothing makes you feel the Holidays more than great holiday music – Christmas Carols, Hymns, Songs of Praise and Worship and fun secular songs like “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer” and “Jingle Bell Rock” set the holiday mood.

This year we are showcasing some of the more unique Holiday Radio Stations available streaming online. From classic carols to twisted Christmas to Gospel Reggae Christmas. So check out some of the stations below – sign up for a FREE listener account – and save the stations you like in our preset widget for easy listening throughout the holiday season.

Comments are open for this post – so please add any other Christmas and Holiday Radio stations below….

Lounge & Chillout Christmas and Holiday Radio


SomaFM Holiday Chillout Radio

Christmas Lounge Chilled holiday grooves and classic winter lounge tracks. (Kid and Parent safe!)


The Reindeer Room – Christmas Chillout on Last.fm

A great cd of chilled out Christmas tunes – listen on last.fm


Caribbean Reggae Gospel & Christmas


Tehilla Radio – Trinidad Gospel Reggae Christmas Music

Tune in for unique holiday flavored gospel reggae


Classic Holiday & Christmas Radio


The Vibe

The Vibe 105 plays all of your music favorites and requests! We are featuring Christmas Music this holiday season


Happy Christmas Radio

Welcome to Happy Christmas Radio, the biggest Christmas themed radio on the Internet. Come and celebrate Christmas with us. We play Christmas songs, back to back, 24/7. You planned a Christmas party, but forgot all about the music? Not to worry. Just tune into Happy Christmas Radio and enjoy the music. We offer you and your guests the most appropriate musical background. Want to create that Christmas atmosphere at home or in the office? Don’t look further. Tune into Happy Christmas radio and there you are.


Old Time Christmas Radio

Celebrate Christmas from a simpler time! Old Time Radio Christmas features shows with air dates ranging from the early 30’s to the mid 60’s. you’ll hear Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, George Burns & Gracie Allen, Milton Berle, Fibber McGee & Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, and tons of holiday suprises sure to bring a smile to your face.


Jazzy Holiday Music


Christmas Radio 24/7

Smooth Jazz Holiday Music – Great for cocktail parties


Country Christmas


Heartland Public Radio – Country Christmas Channel

Get the best country and western Christmas classics on Heartland Public Radio


Alternative Christmas


The Cutting Edge-Where Jesus, Santa and Alternative Rock meetup and jam!

A unique playlist of over 4,000 alternative rock songs that blend Jesus, Santa and rock and roll


Humorous & Twisted Christmas Radio


LHMRadio – Twisting Christmas Since 2002

We play Christmas radio and Humour radio.
This radio station was tagged with LHMRadio, Christmas, Xmas, Twisted, Maine

Shoutcast 1.x Now Playing – Current Song Title – php script

This script is supported by streamfinder.com

To use this script follow these directions:

1) Download .zip file below and expand it – inside there is one file -> “sc_now_playing.php”

2) Open this file using a text editor like notepad and edit the top of the file by entering your server url or ip address and port number.

3) Upload this file to your web root and call it up in your browser.

CAVEATS:

Your hosting provider must support php for this script to work.

Your shoutcast server must be a 1.x version – not the new 2.0 version.

This script is supported by streamfinder.com so if you have any questions then post them below.

Shoutcast 1.x Now Playing PHP Script (17091)

Minimal Techno Radio – 12 Streaming mnml Radio Stations

Minimal techno is a minimalist sub-genre of techno. It is characterized by a stripped-down aesthetic that exploits the use of repetition, and understated development. This style of dance music production generally adheres to the motto less is more; a principle that has been previously utilized, to great effect, in architecture, design, visual art, and Western art music. Minimal techno is thought to have been originally developed in the early 1990s by Detroit based producers Robert Hood and Daniel Bell, although what is currently referred to as ‘minimal’ has largely been developed in Germany during the 2000s, and made very popular in the second half of the decade by labels such as Kompakt and M-nus. (from wikipedia )

Following is a list of 12 of the top minimal techno radio stations on StreamFinder.com – comments are open at the bottom of this post – if you know of other stations, blogs or forums about minimal techno music then add them below. Enjoy the stations! Continue reading Minimal Techno Radio – 12 Streaming mnml Radio Stations