A Late Summer
In my last post I said I would post up the past WildFire audio recordings. Unbeknownst to all of you I DID! Why didn't anyone know? Because I totally forgot to post about it. In fact I neglected to post for so long that its nearly time for FALL WildFire.
Never fear though, prepare yourself for a MEGAPOST of _ALL_ the WildFire audio I have available! Thanks as always to the DJs for their amazing talents on and off the field.
Summer 2012 (links fixed Sep 14th)
- Friday - nope, we had recording problems. Sorry.
- Saturday - The Amazing Baz (Baz Simon)
- Sunday - DJ Recluse (Matt Weston)
- Perfomance Class (coming soon... I hope)
Spring 2012 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Never Gonna Bop) - Originally posted in "WildFire Spring 2012"
Fall 2011 (Friday, Saturday, Performance [wav]) - I'm not sure why I don't have sunday. I'll look around again.
Summer 2011 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday)
Spring 2011 (Friday, Saturday) - Sunday didn't happen because I forgot a power adapter and was WAY too busy playing with my flowlights. Read more in "Burning Beats and a Shining Light of Craziness"
Fall 2010 (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) - This was my first recording attempt. The quality is pretty mixed (meaning a bit awful). Original post "A Taste of Home"
WildFire Spring 2012
Another amazing weekend. More will go here later, but first the IMPORTANT stuff.
- Friday
- Saturday
- Sunday
- Never Gonna Bop (extra long cut) Sunday night sampler fun! (also on soundcloud)
- Never Gonna Bop
The music is hosted on my personal server this time, so it'll be there for the forseeable future. I will be reposting older recordings as well.
Real Life Radio
This past weekend I took and passed the HAM Technician test, which has been a vague life goal for years now. I say vague because it kept fading out of site under other things I was doing. While I wait for my ID to get processed by the FCC I decided to dig up information on the radio tower at work.
It's actually pretty interesting from a radio nerd and history perspective.
First some pictures with a little info: http://deakworld.weebly.com/ham-radio-odds--sods.html
Then a thread with some more info on QRZ: http://forums.qrz.com/showthread.php?217251-Antenna-Discoveries-in-NY&p=1694077#post1694077
I am going to try to get permission this week to go exploring and take my own pictures... for science.
LadioCast automation (AppleScript)
Playing music is fun, LadioCast is an awesome tool that lets you broadcast ANY audio from your soundcard to an icecast server. It also lets you mix from multiple sources. Being a simple tool it doesn't grab it's own metadata info or anything fancy like that. There are several common ways to update this info and they're covered other places online. Below I've included my own ladiocast_update script that adds a bit extra to the metadata mix.
Sometimes you want to play a stream for a bit and then drop offline cleanly, but you don't want to hang around to wait for it to finish (sleep is awesome once or twice a month).
Through the magic of AppleScript you can do this. [We can have platform debates later, my whole broadcast kit is in osx right now, get over it.]
This script queries iTunes for the current state (playing, paused, stopped). If the stream is seen playing or paused it updates the metadata in ladiocast with the info from the currently playing track. If it finds that it has stopped it plays the "radio off" playlist (used to give a sign-off message), waits a little bit (for the message to finish) and then kills the stream.