Radiopower Progressive Radio Network In Trouble!

[benburch]

Friends,

Many of you have come to depend on the Streaming Radio signal provided by Radiopower.org to listen to The Thom Hartmann Show, Radio Inside Scoop with Mark Levine, and The Tony Trupiano Show.

It saddens me to report that they have been unable to make financial ends meet and have now been forced off the air. I think this is a terrible thing to happen in this most important of all election years, and I hope that those of you who are able to will join me in making a generous donation to restore Radiopower's signal.

To contribute, you can use http://www.PayPal.com/ and send funds to [e-mail], or use the donations links on either the Radiopower.org web site, or the donations links I provide on White Rose Society on the pages for the above mentioned shows.

During this outage, White Rose Society intends to do what it can to continue to provide archive service for these fine Liberal/Progressive voices, and to explore what might be done in terms of a P2P streaming solution for these shows.

Thanks so much!

[Poiuyt]

1. Oh No!

Radiopower.org is my favorite liberal talk radio station. (much better than Air America IMHO). I hope they are able to get back on.

[faithnotgreed]

2. sorry - by chance does it have anything to do with air americas emergence?

[benburch]

3. Honestly I'm not sure.

I'd prefer to believe that the market for Liberal and Progressive voices is broad enough that it isn't even close to saturated.

[Robbien]

4. Thanks Ben for the notice

I missed them and wondered what was going on when I couldn't get Thom Hartmann.

Sent them what I could. It wasn't much, but hopefully it will help.

[benburch]

5. You're welcome.

I only hope that it isn't too late to save this valuable resource.

[benburch]

6. Kick

:kick:

This is important, folks!

[LTR]

7. How does this affect Hartmann's show?

I know he's the best know of the hosts, and he even has a few affiliates, including Sirius Left.

I also heard that he has the ability to send his show out himself, though I could be wrong.

[benburch]

8. Well, this is a pretty serious thing.

Thom has another streaming source, CRN, but I am not certain that they have anything like that capacity that Radiopower had. You can find the link to the CRN Windows Media stream on Thom's site. Mark Levine also has an alternative streaming provider. Both are Windows Media streams, which can be a problem for many users.

I am quite certain that the majority of the Internet audience for both of these shows was through Radiopower. Radiopower had the ability to serve thousands of streams.

As soon as I am able, I intend to get both Thom Hartmann and Mark Levine set up for MP3 P2P streaming. This will probably not be before the end of the week, however, as I have a very full schedule this week.

If anybody reading this has any experience with P2P streaming, I would be happy to hear from you.

Thanks!

[salin]

29. KICK

[Poiuyt]

9. Ben, will you continue to archive the shows that are streamed?

Like Hartmann and Levine?

[benburch]

10. That is my intention

I believe that I have the issue solved for Hartmann and Levine, and should have it solved for Trupiano by the end of the week.

One bonus is that I should be able to pick up the entire four hours that Tony Trupiano streams. (Radiopower only streamed two hours of the show.)

[Armstead]

11. Ben

I'm not real familiar with streamning. Is the P2P thing for live sreaming or just for downloads to save?

[benburch]

12. Live streaming.

What a P2P streaming system does is; You listen to the stream, and at the same time, send that same stream out to one or more other people, depending on what sort of connecton you have. If you are on a modem, you feed to only one other person. If you are on a DSL line, you probably feed to several others. This is all pretty much invisible to the user once the P2P software is set up. All current P2P systems have a central directory site which refers users automagically to an available stream.

The upside of this is that I don't have to buy expenasive streaming bandwidth.

The downside is that the stream gets a bit more delayed with each "hop" from the originating stream, and that it is somewhat less reliable. For example, if the person whose echoed stream you are listening to goes offline, you will need to reconnect.

All-in-all it is better than waiting the several hours for the archive to appear, and it is something which I can most likely implement this week.

[WFF]

13. Kick

[benburch]

14. Thanks for the kick!

Saves me from being the only kicker, which always feels uncomfortable.

[WFF]

22. I'd hate to have you feel uncomfortable :)

[symbolman]

15. I'll give this a kick too

Take Back the Media used to do the news feed at the top of the hour for Thom Hartman - he's a great resource and so is Radiopower --

we do a weekly radio show ourselves at Take Back the Media http://www.takebackthemedia.com and we all need to support each other..

keep up the good work,

symbolman

[benburch]

16. Peercast

I'm currently looking at http://www.peercast.org/ as the platform to set up the (hopefully temporary) P2P streaming for Radiopower's shows.

Would you kind folks have a look at that and give me your comments?

The other P2P choice is Streamer, but that seems to be Windows-only, and Peercast covers Windows, Linux and MacOS X.

Thanks!

[Robbien]

17. Don't really know much about P2P

So thought I may be of some help just by testing it as a user. Installed Peercast and now am listening to an Eclectic music station on my dialup. Not too bad, so far no buffering and the drag on the system is no worse than normal streaming.

[benburch]

19. That's a good datapoint...

What operating system do you use?

[Robbien]

20. Wow this is kinda neat

Seems as if they load the next whole song on to my system while the current one is playing. The reason I found this out is because my ISP drops out every four hours and it just did it but the song continued playing until the end of the song.

Neat.

Operating system is Windows/XL

Oh, and while downloading Peercast I saw this comment on the site:

I have used PeerCast before but left to also test out StreamerP2P and what I have found out is PeerCast is much easier to use and faster loading then Streamer.

[benburch]

21. Good! Thanks!

I'm going to try to have at least Thom's show onto PeerCast tomorrow, assuming I don't have to many "Honeydew" items to deal with when I get home tonight.

[Robbien]

23. A kick and an update

Listening for about two hours now. No buffering at all and the streaming of songs have been seamless. Have no idea how this works, but however this Peercast is using my computer as a part of their server system it is not bad at all.

Much nicer than listening to Live365 which buffers all the time.

The bitrate of the station I hooked up to is 24kb/s. Don't know if that bit of info is helpful to you or not.

[benburch]

24. Excellent.

I did manage to archive Thom Hartmann's show today, and it is now available on http://www.WhiteRoseSociety.org/

[Robbien]

25. Do I have this right

Will you be receiving Thom Hartmann's show tomorrow and then forwarding the show through Peercast? Or is it something like we will just be listening in on what you are receiving? Or is this P2P thing a lot more complicated.

[benburch]

26. Correct.

I receive Thom's show directly in real time via a shoutcast mirror. In fact, Radiopower was receiving Thom's show via my mirror when they were broadcasting. (And hopefully will be broadcasting again.)

I then plan to pass that signal into PeerCast, and thence to one or more of you who will also be running PeerCast, and automatically passing on the signal to others, and so on.

If this works, and I think it will, there is no reason why several thousand people couldn't listen this way without the show being delayed unduly for people at the end of the chain.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

18. Kick.

[benburch]

27. Just one more kick...

:kick:

[ncrainbowgrrl]

28. Noooooooo!

And the hits just keep on coming. What a day I've had...*sigh*

:kick:

[benburch]

30. Okay here is the deal for tomorrow, Wednesday, for the Hartmann Stream

I *think* I have PeerCast all set up for tomorrow's Hartmann show.

To use PeerCast, you will need to go to http://www.peercast.org and download and install a client program for your machine. All major operating systems are supported.

When the stream goes "live" a directory entry *should* appear in the listings at http://yp.peercast.org/ that will allow you to connect to the stream with your client program. (It isn't there now because the source stream isn't running, or so I believe.)

I will start a thread tomorrow about 11:30 ET for user reports on this experimental service.

Thanks!

[Robbien]

32. There is a brand new radio site at peercast

called KGST Radio - Ghost Trackers Radio which says it has talk and misc. music.

Is this you?

[benburch]

34. Nope...

This one will say "The Thom Hartmann Show Live Stream - daily noon-3 ET" when it appears. (Finger's crossed!)

[benburch]

35. Levine will not be broadcasting for the remainder of the week...

So, although I have that show set up with PeerCast, you won't see it...

[Poiuyt]

31. Kick for the night shift

[Liberal_Dog]

33. Kick

eom

[Bozita]

36. CRN4 streamed Hartmann yesterday ... It worked nicely -- link

I just tuned in to the stream. Seems like it's gonna work again today.

http://www.cableradionetwork.com/?date=6/23/2004&nid=7&pid=1&eid=62

Oh. yeah, it streams on WMP.

[benburch]

37. And they don't have a lot of capacity.

That is why the White Rose sponsored P2P stream is being tried.

If all of the people who listened to Thom on Radiopower went to CRN, it would max out and people would lose connections and it would be very frustrating!

[Bozita]

38. Should I join in with the P2P?

Wanna do the best thing.