my town radio online through my site

hello
i am from a small town in west Africa but i currently live in Italy. Recently i had an idea of creating a website dedicated to my town and one of the functions i want to have on the site is the opportunity for visitors to listen to radio. Well i am not affiliate in anyway to the radion stations and all of them are fully operational fm stations just that they have no presence in the internet. So i want to know how i can "bring" them online and have some kind of widgets of them placed on the site so that visitors to my site can listen to radio from our town. thnx

Hi Salifuj,

We can only suggest contacting the FM stations yourself and proposing your idea to them directly. Hopefully they may be interested in the idea and will then possibly take it further.

Best of luck

there is no technical problem with doing this, provided the radio station can get a decent quality broadband circuit from one of the telecoms providers and then stream to a shoutcast server. They only need a normal desktop PC and soundcard and can often use the same equipment that usually records all the output of a radio station as a requirement of the Communications Ministry licensing.

I set this up for our community radio station in Ipswich, UK and as this is a multicultural town well known throughout the world as it is near the coast and has important maritime heritage we get listeners all across the World...

There are however potential political and legal issues (as well as the cost of the server etc). The music copyright authorities in the country might consider this to be international broadcasting, as may the Communications Ministry. Both of these authorities then tend to want extra money in licensing fees!

PS: This is what we use at ICR. Thats just a refurb windows XP PC. the audio input (from a cheap behringer soundcard and a DI box used to keep away hum and noise) is taken from a rackmounted band II receiver that we use to check the station output from the FM airwaves (to ensure we are correctly on air and that the links are working).

Audio levels are set to EBU standard (-18dBFS is 4 on an old style PPM).

One application records everything in MP3 format onto the hard drive (in the UK it is the law we must keep it for 42 days after broadcast, so must the BBC or Global or Bauer). The other is just Eddcast revisited with the ASIO version that lets you tweak the levels streaming to a shoutcast server (I do push them up slightly by 5dB and then put a brickwall limiter at -1dB so its just loud enough for smaller speakers but not clipped and distorted).



This does have the disadvantage that tropo or sporadic E (atmospheric changes of the signal quality) might knock out the streamed audio and its strictly not quite as good audio quality as feeding the audio direct from the studio via a separate sound path but it means the computer and soundprocessing can do double duty for a station with a small budget.