The PC Professor

Some of the guides and documentation made available here are in the Open Format - you will need a copy of OpenOffice.org which is a freely available Open Source office suite that is available for Windows and Mac as well as Linux. Download it from

http://www.openoffice.org

I’m so excited about Radio 1’s Big Weekend Party on Moor Park in Preston this year I thought I’d record a song. I hope you like it

Talkin Radio 1 Big Weekend Party Massacre Disaster Blues

Well I heard it announced the other day

that the Radio 1 big weekend party was coming our way

bring you up there to Moor Park

bring your wife and family 

bring your whole friends yipee

well I ran right down with my friend

and signed up for this big weekend

little did I realise I was in for a pleasant funny surprise

It was big

It was the weekend

anyway I hate Radio 2

Took my wife and kids onto the park

there were sixty thousand people there

everybody had a ticket for the show

Oh well I said its a pretty big park

Besides the more the merrier

Well we all got on and what do you think

that big old park it started to stink

people kept a piling on

that old park was awash with sewer

and it was raining

funny kind of way to start a picnic

Well I soon lost track of my kids and wife

so many people I never saw in my life

That old park was sinking down in the water

sixty thousand people trying to kill each other

Dogs a barkin, kids a squallin

women a cryin, papers flyin, fists a flying

Cops a comin’, me a runnin’

Maybe we better call off the picnic

I got shoved down I got pushed around

All I remember was a moaning sound

Don’t remember anything more

all I remember was waking up on the floor

My arms was busted, feet were cracked

Couldn’t walk, talk, feel, couldn’t see

didn’t know where I was, I was bald 

Kind of Lucky to be alive though

Feelin like I just climbed out of my casket

I grabbed back hold of my picnic basket

Took the wife and kids and started home

wishing I’d never got up that morni

Now Radio 1 I don’t care  what you do

if you want to have a big weekend thats up to you

but don’t tell me about it, I don’t want to hear it

you see I just lost all my picnic spirit

I’ll stay at home, have a picnic in my bathroom

Listen to the music on the radio

Never did like picnics 

You can please all of the people some of the time or some of the people all of the time

but you can’t please all of the people all of the time

I think Abraham Lincoln said that

I think we ought to take some of these people, put them on a bus

and send them up to Preston for the Radio 1 Big Weekend party on Moor park

I said that 

This was a work in two parts.

Part one was to generate sounds from electronic equipment that was low cost/recycled/donated, from a location with no electricity.

Part two was then to broadcast the audio over the internet.

The location was a ruined chapel on the North West England coast in a village called Heysham, and the sound was generated using light, temperature and sound sensors feeding into a portable PC which was running open source software called Pure Data. The software to broadcast the event over the internet was "Oddcast" using a GPRS mobile connection to forward the signal to the folly "Icecast" server. The artist P-Tex will document the perfromance on his web site www.p-tex.co.uk and also through the folly site www.folly.com. The process for streaming audio over the internet was explored and documented by myself in advance with the full document available from www.theubuntuguru.co.uk.

The performance was due to start at 17:30 with the live broadcast at 19:30. The artist and two friends set up a tent in the cliff top location with a quad sound system out of a car to amplify the sound, a laptop PC with various sensors to measure the changing environment, a number of large batteries for power and a bicycle powered generator to keep the batteries topped up. The team battled against the elements for two hours, overcoming a number of setbacks such as the PC refusing to boot, the sound system not working, the batteries failing sooner than expected, the cycle power proving not as effective as hoped and the home made wind turbine not giving out sufficient current. However the performance took place as planned and proved both interesting and stimulating. Unfortunately there was heavy rain earlier on and a GPRS signal was difficult to obtain. The weather improved as the evening progressed however and a live broadcast finally took place at 19:49 A number of pictures taken on the surrounding site and in the tent are shown below.

The full guide is now finished with additional Case Studies to explore certain areas required for the GYOML performance. Additionally, for anyone who has my earlier draft guide for Dynebolic, I have just found that there is a new version of dynebolic v2.1 which now contains the icecast server. I have made the guide available from my new site which is dedicated to various documentation on Ubuntu and related open source software. Please feel free to obtain it from http://www.theubuntuguru.co.uk

This is the final part of the commission. I have documented two scenarios that manage all the requirements that I set out to cover. The first uses Ubuntu and allows for a setup which can be accessed remotely so that the server can be started and stopped remotely and the play list can be changed manually again via remote access. This is ideal for setting up your own juke box to listen to while you are at work. This scenario also covers the setting up and use of a wholely Free and Open Source Web Radio. The second scenario covers the use of Shoutcast on Windows. Although not strictly FOSS, both Winamp and Shoutcast are free, so if you already have windows, the setup or web radio is free. This covers the News Radio for visually impaired (as people listening may only have windows media player which doesn’t support Ogg Vorbis) and also the requirements of the GYOML in a field project for similar reasons.

 Case Studies for Audio Streaming

It is important to bear in mind that the versions currently on this web site are draft versions and so may have the odd mistake. When the final version is available I will remove all the draft versions.

My next step is to get the streaming audio working on a full Linux system rather than the specific dynebolic platform. The reason for this is that a full Linux system is going to be much more felxible and in a Media Workshop situation, likely to be more useful overall. The downside of course is that as a general Linux distro isn’t optimised for audio and video, there is going to have to be much more setting up and hence a deeper understanding of how things work. It is generally accepted for example that getting the sound working as you want can be a problem on Linux systems. However, the latest Ubuntu version 6 (nicknamed Dapper Duck) has a kernel that is optimised for music and all the tools that you want easily available from the "Synaptic Package Manager". This is the Ubuntu way of getting additional software and it’s so easy once you know what you are doing. The way it works is that the software is held in "repositories" on the web. There is a specific file which tells ubuntu which repositories to use. It’s worth knowing how to edit this file as the basic system doesn’t have all the available repositories enabled. The reason for this is that some of the available software may be subject to licensing laws which vary from country to country (for example it is illegal to download the MP3 codec in America) and some of the software may be beta versions or not fully tested on ubuntu. Once you have enabled the repositories that you want (this is covered in the documentation) you have access to literally thousands of free software packages. I haven’t found one yet that wasn’t available apart from the MuSE package used by dynebolic and that is easily downloaded and installed manually.

I have installed the latest Ubuntu on a test machine and documented the process and with this machine I am going to use a slightly different method of playing the audio. Still using Icecast2 as the main server, I will be using a package called Ices2 to encode whatever music is being played on the PC using a standard music player - in this case XMMS which is a winamp clone.

I have spent the morning setting up, testing and documenting basic web radio using dynebolic.

see attached document for more information

 Streaming with Dynebolic

Well I was fortunate and was awarded the commission to carry out the research. I’ll post more about the performance nearer the time but this is what I know at the moment.

"Jason Lamb will be delivering GYOML in a field 1. Jason proposes to research, create, perform and broadcast in real time over the internet, an experimental music and video installation, for the Grow Your Own Media Lab project.he will use open source software "Pure Data" to create a patch for a web cam, sensors and microphone that will recognise and transmit information of the continually varying states, such as temperature, moisture, brightness, colour shade, postion and intensity of hot spots, wind speed and if possible co2 levels. This information will then be transmitted to audio software also written in Pure Data where it will be processed accordingly. For example, as the surrounding light during the performance turns to day the pitch of an electronic sound will increase, or as the suns intensity increases as it appears over the hill a pitch starts to wobble.A desktop microphone will also be used to transmit ambient sounds that occur during the performance, like bird song for example. It is intended that footage is be recorded of the event for both broadcast and the various research stages to DV. The power will be generated by a small wind turbine and solar panel as well as a wheel to dynamo, the battery will be full at the start of the piece. If there is no wind or sunlight the battery will then be topped up using a rotating wheel and dynamo.The live broadcast via the internet will use current mobile phone and open source broadcast software where users will download links, software and instructions from a given site."

That sounds much more interesting than my submission and uses some cutting edge software and techniques.

My research is around the following:

 "You will be developing a resource for artists which you could describe as a manual of how to set up a live web/radio broadcast using OpenSource pragrams and their creative applications."

I will be investigating and assessing the various FOSS software that is available for live streaming, deciding on one method for the purpose of the research and producing a comprehensive guide on how to set up and use the software. I hope to use two "test" environments apart from my home installation in order to give as much flexibility as possible to the final documentation. One test will hopefully be in a school environment where children can use the technology to experiment with broadcasting sound over the internal intranet as well as the internet, and the other for an organisation for the blind who currently send out audio tapes of local news but who could set up a news channel broadcasting over the internet given the software and techniques covered in my research. Both test environments will provide useful information for the community as a whole when faced with the challenge of setting up anything from a community web radio to an individual artist wanting to make his or her work more readily available.