Rusty on Radio

Analog vs. Digital - or when CD transfers go wrong

2008-07-18T01:10:00.001-07:00

Shelby Lynne has been getting a lot of good press the last couple months about her new album, "Just a Little Lovin'". It's a album of Dusty Springfield covers, and some of them are quite good. But much of the press she's getting is about the overall sound of the album. It was all recorded in Analog. In her blog (which is also a guest editorial in the Huffington Post, she writes:

My new album, Just A Little Lovin’ was made on a 2 inch tape machine. I demanded it. I like working with engineers and producers who love and appreciate tape. I love the sound, smell, and feel of tape. That's why I enlisted legendary record producer Phil Ramone and the brilliant recording engineer Al Schmitt.

I went online to check out the album on iTunes, and sure enough it did have a wonderful vintage sound to it. I bought a couple tracks off iTunes and ordered a CD copy from Amazon. I was disappointed after hearing so much good about this recording to discover that on the CD, as well as the iTunes and Amazon digital downloads, there are several places where the digital audio clips! For example, 3:03 into the first track, there is a nasty clipping in both channels. Again around 3:15. I confirmed it by looking at a AIFF rip of the CD (as well as the MP3) in a DAE and the clipping is as plain as can be. Hopefully the LP doesn't have the same problem (I just ordered it), but considering how this is considered a great audio release, and credited on the CD as mastered by Doug Sax, I'm shocked that he'd let the clipping go on the CD. (I'm betting that Sax didn't do the digital master, just the Analog master.) Here's an example of the clipping as view in Bias Peak: You can see right there in the middle the clipped peaks. Now overloading an analog deck can make for some pleasant sounding compression. But overloading digital sounds really nasty. The clipping is there in the CD, the 128k AAC from iTunes and in the 256kb MP3 from Amazon. They vinyl just arrived today, so I'll give it a listen soon and see if it has the same flaw. I hope it doesn't. But I'm really, really surprised that the CD and digital versions of this album were mastered so poorly. And I'm equally shocked at how many people are saying this is one of the best quality recordings they've ever heard giving the clipping problems.

iPhone streams updated for 2.0/3G

2008-07-10T00:48:00.001-07:00

Until today, our iPhone/iPod Touch streams were only working on the current iPhones with the 1.x software. Now thanks to some testing by Mark Malone at Apple, we've updated our iPhone streams to work with the 2.0 software and the 3G iPhones coming out on Friday. So now our streams work on both old and new iPhones and iPod touches. While I haven't had a chance to test the 3G data network with a new iPhone, you should be able to use the WiFi streams when you're on the ATT 3G network. I'll be interested to see how it works out!

House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property passed the Performance Rights Act

2008-06-27T23:57:00.000-07:00

The fight between the RIAA and the NAB is heating up. The RIAA scored one when the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property passed the Performance Rights Act. I have mixed feelings about this. I don't like the fact that net radio has to pay high royalties while over the air radio doesn't. On the other hand, I don't want to see AM/FM broadcasters forced to pay the same ridiculous rates that we have to pay.

I really think this is going to backfire on the RIAA and it's major label members.

We rolled out iPhone streaming today!

2008-06-20T02:10:00.001-07:00

After a lot of testing, we rolled out iPhone streaming tonight. I'm still not completely happy with the look of our iPhone mini-site so you might see some changes in the near future, but rather than wait until everything was perfect, I decided to release it now.

So now when you go to somafm.com on your iPhone, you get an iPhone-specific site with links for both EDGE (32-56k) and WiFi (128k) streams.

Infrastructure Upgrades

2008-06-19T15:45:00.001-07:00

We've been improving our streaming and web infrastructure for the last couple weeks. Not everything has been launched until we can fully test it for a couple more weeks (for example the web site is still running on the old server). We're also installing a backup web server on the East Coast at the facilities of Steadyhost (where we have some streaming servers now). We've been happy with the service provide by Steadyhost, they also provide hosting for some other large internet radio stations such as DI.FM.

Continued problems with our hosting provider; email and web move to our San Francisco datacenter under way

2008-06-06T11:01:00.001-07:00

Regrettably, we're still running services from ThePlanet.com's web hosting facilities until we can migrate everything to 365 Main in San Francisco.

So this morning, I wake up to find that our mail server is unreachable again, and this series of messages on The Planet's service update site:

June 6 – 10:00am CDT - We have lost network connectivity to H1. We are confirming the extent of any power loss, and we will be updating shortly.
June 6 – 10:05am CDT - Transport for H1 temporarily fell offline and is restored. H1 Phase 2 did not lose power. H1 Phase 1 lost power. We will be updating again shortly.
June 6 – 10:10am CDT - The temporary generator powering Phase 1 failed. We switched over to the backup generators that were just brought in. The CRAC units have been powered on, and PDUs are having power restored right now. [THis is the second temporary generator that has failed in the last week at The Planet. Perhaps it is operator error? - Rusty]
June 6 – 10:15am CDT - We continue to power PDUs in Phase 1. We will update when all PDUs have been restored.
June 6 – 10:20am CDT - Power has been restored completely to Phase 1. Our DC Ops team will be walking through the aisles to confirm all racks are online.
Customer Support Overview (June 6, 11:30am CDT): -Technical Support Phone: No Hold Time

From our monitoring, the service went down at 7:40 AM pacific, or 9:40 AM CDT. They were a little slow to notice they lost communications with their data center!

Of course our mail server is still unreachable at 11:44 Pacific, or 1:44 PM CDT, 4 hours after they stated that power has returned.

What really annoys me is that they are stating on their site, "Technical Support Phone: No Hold Time". The reason for this is that they're sending all support calls to their sales people, who don't do much more than tell you they're going to escalate you to Level 2 support, but all those techs are busy and they'll need to call you back. I suspect they did that to reduce their 800 number call expenses, because they had hundreds of customers sitting on hold for 30-40 minutes all the time. They also get to make it look like their response time is much better than it really is.

After waiting 45 minutes for a callback that never came, I called in again. Finally I got them to connect me with a real tech support service, not just the person logging callbacks. I've been on hold with "real" technical support at The Planet for 10 minutes now, trying to get our mail server powered back on.

10 more minutes on hold, and the tech tells me, "Can you go online and submit a reboot request ticket, that will expedite things."

At this point I have no faith of when our mail will be back again.

I'll continue to move our services out of The Planet and to our own servers in San Francisco; our DNS is already moved (although we still don't have the redundant location DNS in place yet); the hardware for the new mail server is setup but the mail services aren't configured yet. There are also a few issues with some of the web services we run; the old systems at the Planet used a much older version of the Berkeley DB software package which isn't compatible with the current versions. So I have make a few changes to our "now playing" code as well as our stream server monitoring systems. The "now playing" database is the most important to our listeners, because that's got all the information on which album songs come from, as well as the info on where to buy the track or get more info on the artist.

The mail server is a bit harder to migrate, but I'm also working on that right now as well.

Hopefully, the good thing that will eventually come out of this is that we'll have redundant servers, in different geographic locations,

Tough Weekend Outage

2008-06-03T11:07:00.001-07:00

The company that hosts the webserver for SomaFM.com and the mail server, ThePlanet.net, had a rather large outage last weekend, which took the SomaFM web site off the air (so to speak) from 3:08 PM PDT Pacific time on Saturday, until about 3:37 AM Pacific time Monday morning (June 2nd).

Our mail server is still down, about 72 hours later. More on that in a bit.

The cause of this outage was outage was not immediately known, and calls to The Planet's tech support lines (which had 30 minute waits) were "unrewarding" to say the least. At first they wouldn't give me any information at all (because I didn't have the proper password), and they were only giving out information to "affected customers". I pointed out that since they had caller ID and they knew that I was calling from the phone number on record for our account, that should prove adequate to allow them to give me some information on what was happening. The rep finally agreed, even though he said, "he could get in trouble for telling me this".

What he told me was that they had had a transformer explosion at the datacenter where our servers were located.

This seemed kind of fishy, didn't they have adequate generator power? What about the UPSes? Blown transformers happen fairly frequently, that's one reason you have redundant power systems.

A while later, they made a public announcement about the outage at the Planet's Houston data center:

Today at approximately 5:45 p.m. [central time], a transformer in our H1 data center in Houston caught fire, thus requiring us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers are down until power can be restored.

According to our monitoring logs, it was 5:07 PM central time, not 5:45 PM.

We received more information dated May 31 – 10:46pm (8:46 pm Pacific):

On Saturday, May 31st at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This time makes more sense. Seems like the UPSes did indeed work, but they weren't able to switch over to generator power. So about 10 minutes after they lost power, the UPS batteries were expended, and the facility lost power.

This is also the first time they mention "the short". At first it was just a transformer fire. But now it sounds like it was a transformer explosion caused by an electrical short, which implies that some wires were so overloaded that the insulation melted and caused them to short out.

There have been lots of discussions about the blame for the problems at The Planet. I'm not going to go into that now. However I am less than satisfied at the quality of the communications from them, and not happy with at all how they've handled the situation.

The SomaFM.com web server eventually came back while we were just finishing up restoring our backups to a new web server. (So at least we now have a tested plan and sequence from restoring from backups!)

However, as of 10:30am on June 3rd, our mail server is still not running, nor did it come back up when The Planet said that they had powered back on the part of the datacenter where it is located. After sitting on hold (with very bad music) for 35 minutes, a tech told me that our mail server machine was one of the older ones that would have to be powered on by hand... and that there were over 1000 of these machines that they would be going around and turning on one at a time. But that never happened.

The last update on The Planet's web site was kind of ominous:

This morning at approximately 2:45 a.m. CST, the temporary generator supplying power to the servers and environmental control systems located in Phase 1 of our H1 facility shut down. This was caused by some faulty current sensors in the output breaker. The sensors detected an out of balance current condition that did not exist.

At this point, I don't know when the mail servers will be working again. I guess we have to deploy a new mail server (which is also the secondary DNS server).

Wait! Another update:

Fixing the faulty breaker on the generator powering H1 Phase 1 was not successful. we have located a second generator that is currently being delivered to the facility. It is expected to arrive this afternoon and we will provide additional information regarding the new generator at that time.

That doesn't sound promising. And for all I know, our server has been blown up by a power glitch or something. Time to get working on that new mailserver, I guess!

Unfortunately, I screwed up and didn't properly backup the mail server configs and will have to recreate all that by hand, so it's not a real simple process.

But I guess it won't take too long as I won't have any interruptions from email today!

But now we do have a full backup of the SomaFM web server up and running at our rack in 365 Main's San Francisco data center. And I'm working on getting further redundancy in place so this won't impact our listeners much if it happens again.

You can follow the drama of The Planet on their Service Update web page.

And thanks for your patience with us.

Satellite distribution is expensive

2008-05-30T17:20:00.001-07:00

I've been looking in to getting Groove Salad distributed over satellite- we've had a few college / public radio stations ask about using it for their weekend and overnight programming. While we have a deal with NPR for distribution of Groove Salad over the NPR satellite service, it's only for use on HD radio multicast channels, and is not allowed to be used for over-the-air analog use.

So I looked into what it would cost to have PRSS (the public radio satellite system) give us a 24x7 satellite feed - which would make it really easy for any over-the-air station to broadcast us (since they already have the equipment for it in place).

It's expensive. $13,000 a month. A 12 hour a day feed would cost $9625. Add onto that the cost of a T1 back to Washington DC to feed their uplink - that's going to be about $1000 more a month, plus another $3000 or so for the Musicam encoding hardware.

I also talked to the folks from Clear Channel Satellite Services when I was at NAB. They're a bit less expensive; but with everything (the T1, sat time) it was going to be around $9500 a month with a 2 year commitment. The caveat is that most public radio stations don't have the satellite gear to receive the Clear Channel satellite feeds; on the other hand, most commercial stations do.

Alternatively, we could use an internet-based solution, the problem is that many of them now have too much buffer delay (10 seconds or more, vs half a second for satellite). There are low latency "over the internet" systems from Musicam, Comrex and others, but they require expensive hardware at both ends.

We'd love to get our programs out there in more places, but the non-internet distribution costs are still quite high.

Airchecks of LA or SF radio from mid 1970s?

2008-05-21T00:39:00.001-07:00

I'm trying to find some full length airchecks from the LA and SF areas from 1973-1978. Of particular interest would be KNX-FM from 1975-1977, and KKDJ from about 1974 until a bit before they became KIIS-FM. I'd also love to find some KROQ from 1978-1980. And any other "Boss Radio" airchecks. (KHJ, etc). I'm looking for the full length ones, not "scoped" stuff. I just got a working reel-to-reel deck again, and I've been transcribing to MP3 some of my old recordings. One thing I will be posting in the next few weeks is the last days of KNX-FM before they became KKHR. One thing I've noticed from listening to these is that Radio used to be good. Voice tracking and automation abuse killed popular radio. (Although KNX-FM was automated and it was one of the greatest FM stations of all time. Automation is a tool; when used correctly it can sound great, when used poorly, it sounds like Chear Channel's HD2 stations.)

Save Net Radio Press Release

2008-05-15T11:24:00.001-07:00

INTERNET RADIO MAKES A COMEBACK IN THE SENATE The Grassroots Movement to Save Internet Radio from Extinction is Reinvigorated by Senate Judiciary Committee – Brownback Offers Industry Saving Legislation

Save Net Radio Press Release

WASHINGTON D.C. – Legislation introduced in the House and the Senate last year to bring parity and equality to the new radio market made a comeback today during a Senate Judiciary mark-up. The Internet Radio Equality Act (IREA), which would establish a flat rate for performance royalty fees paid by cable, satellite and Internet radio providers, was offered as an amendment to the Orphan Works Act of 2008 (S. 2913) by Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) during a scheduled mark-up of the intellectual property legislation today.

The amendment, which was later withdrawn, signals the renewed efforts of Net radio webcasters to reverse an unprecedented 2007 rate increase by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) that threatens to bankrupt the industry. Expressing his “strong support for internet radio,” Chairman Leahy welcomed future consideration of Internet radio royalties.

“It has been more than a year since the CRB raised the cost of webcasting to an untenable amount,” said Jake Ward, spokesperson for the SaveNetRadio campaign, “and all we are is a year older. Last year, more than two million people called on Congress to take action, and 150 Members in the House and Senate heard them and signed on in support of the Internet Radio Equality Act, but we still don’t have a solution. In the past year, rates have been set for net radio’s direct competition, satellite and cable radio providers, at a rate three and four times less than their proposals to Internet radio. It is disappointing and absurd that while Net radio is fighting for its survival, the industry has been put at an even greater disadvantage. This is unacceptable and hardly the good faith negotiations the House Commerce committee directed SoundExchange to participate in more than nine months ago.”

“Senator Brownback has been a staunch ally of small businesses and independent artists whose livelihoods depend on Internet radio since this fight began a year ago,” Ward continued. ”The offering of the amendment today and Senator Brownback’s leadership and dedication to equality should serve as a reminder to other Members that Internet radio and its tens of millions of supporters are not going away quietly. We should all be in this together. This continued battle is perlexing but we are committed to fighting for fairness – fairness for artists, fairness for independent labels, and fairness for webcasters. In the coming weeks and months, SaveNetRadio will be directing our formidable grassroots to support legislation that ensures artists are fairly compensated while leveling the playing field for webcasters.”

Following a March 2, 2007, decision by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), a division of the Library of Congress charged with establishing performance royalty rates for “digital radio” broadcasters, to increase rates for webcasters by an unjustified and unprecedented 300 to 1200 percent, a national coalition of webcasters, independent artists and Net radio listeners began petitioning Congress to take action. The Internet Radio Equality Act (S. 1353/H.R. 2060), which would set the rate for all digital radio – cable, satellite and internet radio – at 7.5% of revenue, was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sam Brownback (R-KA) and in the House by Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Don Manzullo (R-IL).

In November of 2007, SoundExchange formally proposed that cable radio services pay royalties between 7.25% and 7.5% of their revenue to sound recording copyright owners and recording artists. The following month, the Copyright Royalty Board, citing market constraints and a desire not to disrupt the industry, further reduced the royalty rate for satellite radio to 6% of broadcaster revenue –increased incrementally to 8% over the next five years. Cable and satellite radio generated $2 billion in 2006 while Internet radio produced less than $150 million. Under the current CRB ruling webcasters would pay an average 30% of revenue in royalty fees – and as much as 150% in some cases.

Radio And Internet Newsletter reports: SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE TO LOOK AT WEBCASTING ROYALTIES

2008-05-15T11:20:00.001-07:00

SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE TO LOOK AT WEBCASTING ROYALTIES:

"At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary committee this morning, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) revived the issue of Internet radio performance royalties by proposing to add the Internet Radio Equality Act as an amendment to an unrelated copyright bill. Committee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), while expressing his support for webcasters, countered by suggesting that the committee examine the issue in June in the context of broadcast radio performance royalties.

[RAIN will] have more details as they emerge. You can also check the SaveNetRadio website here: http://www.savenetradio.org."

I guess it may be time to go back to Washington DC again. Perhaps this time we can get some traction on that bill.

SanFran MusicTech Summit

2008-05-06T18:28:00.001-07:00

I'll be moderating a panel on new developments in streaming at the SanFran MusicTech Summit this Thursday, May 8th at the Hotel Kabuki. Our panel will start at 1:50pm in the Osaka Room (the downstairs room behind the Spring Room). With me will be:

John Richey - Wireless Music Delivery Expert, Apple
Greg Ogonowski - VP of New Product Development, Orban
Chris Grigg - Head of Standards, Beatnick
Tim Pozar - VP of Engineering, UnitedLayer

We're going to be talking about delivery methods. New codecs. Streaming to mobile devices. Internet radio hardware devices. How to determine if you really need a content delivery network. It should be real fun.

Here's a blurb about the summit:

The SanFran MusicTech Summit will bring together digital thought leaders from the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as from all around the country to the region which currently leads the way in innovating (both socially, and technologically) new ways of interacting with both music, and musicians. We will be working long term to help enable a sustainable, ongoing, Northern California based music and related technology market.

About that preroll

2008-04-21T10:53:00.001-07:00

A couple people wrote in complaining on how we added a "preroll" support SomaFM message to our streams.

That was a mistake; The preroll was only supposed to show up when people were listening via third-party sites which embed our streams on their sites (next to our ads). Unfortunately, I made a mistake in a config file and left off one line... and that caused everyone listening with Windows Media to get the message...

Here's an example of what we were trying to affect. That's one of many sites that embed our streams in their pages, as if they were the source of our content, and then sell ads around our stream!

I tried to make it so that when they connected to our stream, they got the donation pre-roll first. After all we are paying for all the bandwidth and royalties and they're selling ads on our content!!! But rather than just block it, we thought we could make more people aware that we're supported by our listeners.

But I made a type in a config file. Left in an extra "#". And so all Windows Media listeners were getting the preroll. Not just the leachers.

So its fixed now.

If we ever do something like that in the future; it will be done where you only hear the leader/preroll ONCE a day at most, not repeated every time you change channels. But even that would be reserved for something special, we wouldn't do that on a regular basis.

Ibiquity's new plan to save HD Radio...

2008-04-17T15:57:00.001-07:00

Ibiquity briefly discussed their new plan to save HD Radio: government requirements to HD radio technology in all radios sold in the US. Guys, that isn't going to fly. You're not going to get the US Gov to legislate you a monopoly. "But they did it with FM, they forced radio makers to include FM on all their radios, and UHF on all their TVs!" Yes, but HD radio is not a frequency band. HD radio is a proprietary modulation scheme and iBiquity Digital is the sole developer and licenser of HD Radio technology in the U.S.

Of course Ibiquity wants the FCC to make their system mandatory, they'd then get a license fee on every radio sold in the US.

They must be big believers in that old saying, "If you can't innovate, legislate!"

EVDO, Wireless Performance, Radio Remote broadcasts and violating your terms of service

2008-04-15T00:07:00.001-07:00

As I sit here in my Las Vegas Motel Room (the Best Western Mardi Gras, selected only on the basis of price and proximity to the Las Vegas Convention Center, where NAB is taking place) I'm thinking about how bad wireless performance is in general.

Right now, I'm typing over EVDO, because the hotel internet - powered by Lodgenet's StayOnline - is completely dysfunctional ("timeout connecting to network"). This is the same StayOnline that gave us so much trouble at the Marriott in Austin when we were trying to cover SXSW. I guess I should learn never to depend on the in-room wireless internet at most hotels/motels, because if the hotel is busy at all - the network will be unusable.

But, we have an EVDO card! We bring our own bandwidth with us rather than rely on the hotel internet, because that way we can always have internet access over "Sprint's EVDO Rev. A networks with data speeds up to 3.1 Mbps!" Only it doesn't work that way. In fact, these days, we're lucky if we get 500kb down. Here's what I get from the Speakeasy Speed Test:

Not too impressive.

You see the problem happens when there are too many EVDO users. And for Sprint (like Verizon), that means all the people that have their multimedia phones. And there are more and more of those out there all the time, fighting for the finite amount of bandwidth at each cell site.

We really saw this last weekend, when we webcast from Yuri's Night. At first, the webcast worked great. We had plenty of speed. But as all the geeks started arriving for the big party that evening, the network started getting slower and slower. By 8pm, that stream (from Stage 2) rebuffered so much it was pretty much unusable.

We were doing the main stage broadcasts from WayneCo's Bus which is equipped with a Motosat satellite internet uplink, which usually only gets about 256kb max for uplinks, unless you pay a hefty additional fee (which uses multiple transponders). So we didn't have enough bandwidth to stream both from the bus, and had to resort to EVDO for the other stage.

WiFi was also out of the question. With 5 SSIDs visible, the only reliable one was the backhaul network for the ticket booths, and not connected to the internet. The public internet was so overloaded that it often disappeared for minutes at a time. And only once were we able to maintain a connection, and that was before the event started. So we couldn't WiFi between our encoding gear at Stage 2 and the bus.

Everyone is always making promises of the happy wonderful infinite bandwidth wireless future. But it's still a way off. In a crowded situation, WiFi is about as useful as a CB radio, OK for really short distances, but for useful distances (200 feet or more) it falls apart. In this case, we could barely get 40 feet out of the WiFi base station in the bus to a remote machine. Sprint's EVDO works great sometime (4am in the morning in places where there aren't many users, for example) but lately in many different places we've used it, the service is over subscribed and slow, slow, slow.

Verizon's EVDO works just as badly as Sprint.

Wayne de Geere, who graciously provided his bus as our base of operations, has a Verizon EVDO, which worked about as poorly as the Sprint one. We chose the Sprint service because of Verizon's Terms of Service actually prohibit streaming audio and/or video and updating webcams and pretty much anything actually useful you'd do with their service. Sprint's restrictions are pretty much limited to things that violate the law.

Bottom line: we should have brought lots of wire. And run 600 ohm balanced audio from the stages back to where we were. Or installed wired ethernet connections to each stage. Or used something like a Marti SRPT 30 analog remote pickup unit, the technology that terrestrial radio broadcasters have been using for 30+ years.

Low tech, old fashioned, but tried and true.

Last question on the HD radio panel

2008-04-14T16:28:00.001-07:00

I was on a panel about HD radio today, and the last question they asked was: "End it or Mend It?"

I'll spare you the details, but I was the only one that bordered on "End it", I said some days, I think we should end it, other days I think we can mend it.

But afterwards, a couple people came up to me and said, you should have just said, "kill it now!" There is a lot of frustration in the radio industry over this. HD radio isn't taking off. It's being marketed completely wrong. It doesn't solve a problem. It's taking too much of the limited resources that terrestrial stations have.

I guess I should have been meaner and just said, "End it now" after all.

Update: Video of the HD Radio panel here, courtesy of TV Worldwide.

Clear Channel and HD radio leverage iTunes for brand awareness

2008-04-10T11:15:00.001-07:00

Clear Channel adds HD radio tagging for iTunes: "Clear Channel Radio, the largest radio broadcaster in the United States, is now tagging tracks played on its digital radio stations to help listeners buy music through iTunes. The company is leveraging HD radio technology to provide the new service."

What does that mean? In reality, it means if you have a compatible HD Radio with an iPod dock (which there is apparently only one model at the moment), if you are listening to HD radio (not analog FM, but only HD radio), and you hear a track you like, you press a button. Then the next time you dock your iPod, that list of "tagged" songs is transferred to your iPod in a special playlist. Then when you sync to your computer, you'll have a new playlist in iTunes that doesn't have the actual songs, but the names of songs you tagged. At that point, you can buy the songs on iTunes, and then add them to a new playlist, and then load them onto your iPod.

To use internet radio people, this sounds silly. After all, we have a list that shows everything we've played recently, and that list links to where you can buy the tracks or CDs.

What is the real reason for this "breakthrough technology"? Twofold: 1. It brings up the awareness of HD radio to people who are googling for "ipod". 2. It is an attempt to show the music industry that radio does indeed promote records and that's why terrestrial radio should continue to get an exemption from sound recording royalties.

Note to radio manufactures: a feature in a radio that would be really useful? TiVo-like features. The ability to record the end of a show after you've turned off your car; or a timed recording of a show so you always get the full program you want to listen to. Or a button that you press that saves the last 5 minutes of what you've just heard.

Or how about this lower tech solution: press a button and it stores the name of the song you're playing. You could then recall a list of the songs you liked, right there on the display of the radio. No need to dock, sync, undock, sync again, etc.

But by the time you've gone through all the steps it takes to use the "iTunes Tagging" from HD radio, it would probably be faster to just to write down the song name!

Top (terrestrial) Radio Execs start sounding desperate

2008-04-03T16:23:00.001-07:00

Emmis Broadcasting CEO Jeff Smulyan, quoted in Radio Ink, confirms that he just doesn't get it:

'We're not hiding from new technology, we're driving it. One of the hottest-selling features for the iPod is an FM tuner.'

Or maybe it isn't? Here's the top 10 selling iPod accessories from the Apple Store as of 3-April-08, and I don't see the FM tuner anywhere on it. But the more important thing he's missing is that the FM radio is an iPod remote as well. In fact, it's the only remote control for the iPod that Apple sells now (aside from the one that requires a dock).

'...But one of the biggest reasons for MP3 sales over iPods is that tuners are built in.' The iPod is nearly the only digital audio player available that doesn't come with an FM tuner, but Smulyan said said he believes Apple will soon commit to radio tuners in its market-dominating device.

And I believe Google will give me billions of dollars. That doesn't mean it's going to happen, but it's a nice fantasy world to live in.

Terrestrial radio has to keep repeating this, hoping someone will believe that people do listen to commercial terrestrial radio to discover new music. I think they're just saying that to try and stop the tide of the approaching music royalties being pushed by MusicFirst and the RIAA.

Terrestrial radio across the country adds in total less than 30 tracks a week. That's across all commercial formats, all across America. A typical FM station might add a few tracks each week. Look in the music trades- most stations list less than 5 adds a week. I can discover more music than that just by browsing the recommendations on the iTunes store.

'Our goal, in the next five years, is to have a radio tuner in every portable phone, in every PDA sold in the United States,' Smulyan said. 'We want to reach 400 million more devices in the next five years.' "

I guess I should be thankful that he's not saying put a HD radio receiver in every iPod. (Among other things, that would be a huge battery killer as well).

Tell my why would Apple want to add an AM/FM tuner in to all their iPhones and iPods? It's a $49 accessory with a cost of goods of well under $5, so why would they want to give up that margin, especially if Smulyan is correct and it is actually one of the biggest selling accessories for the iPod? They probably make more margin on it than they do on the Shuffle itself.

People are caring less and less about AM/FM radio all the time. Look at the demographics: they're not getting any new customers. And they're losing a lot of their old customers.

Oh, and Radio Execs: it's not all about the technology. It's about providing the content that people want. And terrestrial hasn't been doing that for a long, long time.

The biggest stumbling block to the death of terrestrial radio altogether is current copyright law. The fact that we have to jump through hoops to distribute Podcasts, the facts that there are so many limitations to the Section 114 music licensing, the fact that we have to pay such high royalties: these are what is keeping digital radio from completely obliterating terrestrial radio.

I'll leave you with one last comparison: Shortwave Radio. This used to be huge 40-60 years ago. There were stations all around the world broadcasting over Shortwave to reach global audiences. People would buy special radios just to pickup the BBC in the US. But now no one listens to shortwave, and many shortwave stations are shutting down their shortwave transmitters, going online instead, because no one listens to shortwave over the air anymore.

AM/FM: You're next. What you should focus on is creating incredible programming that you can stream and podcast, and stop worrying about your expensive transmitters.

HD Radio isn't going to save you. Cookie-cutter HD2 channels aren't going to help you. Forcing manufacturers to include AM/FM radios in mobile devices isn't going to help you. You've lost the battle. Move on.

NAB- National Association of Broadcasters Show in Vegas

2008-04-02T00:15:00.001-07:00

I'll be at NAB all day Monday through Wednesday, April 14th-16th. Monday the 14th is the RAIN Internet Radio Summit (and I'm supposed to be on a panel there), the rest of the time I'll be at NAB proper... mostly in the "multimedia hall" but spending a small amount of time in the Radio hall at the LVCC.

88.5 WFDD Launches HD WFDD-3, Featuring Groove Salad

2008-03-31T11:14:00.001-07:00

88.5 WFDD in Winston-Salem, NC has launched their second HD multicast channel, WFDD-3, featuring Groove Salad at night.

So if you live in the Winston-Salem area, and have a HD radio in your car, you can now listen to Groove Salad when you drive around at night.

(We produce a special version of Groove Salad for NPR which is available for NPR member stations to use on their HD Multicast channels.)

Multicasting from the archives

2008-03-28T23:03:00.001-07:00

Me, 5-Mar-99: ``Multicasting. It's close. And it is going to revolutionize internet radio.``

Man, I got that one wrong! Multicasting never caught on, not because the technology was bad but because there were never any business reasons for ISPs to enable multicast support in their backbone routers... there was no financial incentive for ISPs to support it; rather it was something that would ultimately cost them money to support it, and there was no way for them to effectively get paid for carrying the multicast traffic on their networks.

There was (and still is) no settlement model, hence no business incentive for multicasting. That's the main reason it never took off.

The Performance Royalty Debate

2008-03-12T22:55:00.001-07:00

I'm going to miss this as we'll be setting up for the Bay Area Takeover day party at SXSW, but if you care about the state of radio royalties, go check out this panel.

south by southwest festivals + conferences: "The Performance Royalty Debate
Room 12AB
Thursday, March 13th
11:45 am - 1:00 pm

The United States is the only territory in which terrestrial radio is exempt from paying performance royalties to performers. A coalition of groups is seeking to reverse this anomaly and bring US policy in line with the rest of the world. This legislation faces strong opposition from the broadcast lobby. What are the issues at stake, and what are the chances that Congress will make it law?"

SXSW Panel: using music online

2008-03-12T22:42:00.001-07:00

Elise Nordling (IODA and Indie Pop Rocks! on SomaFM) hosted a panel on using music online, and all the steps you have to go through for podcasting; using music synchronized with video; videos and sound recordings of concert footage and of course internet radio royalties. A podcast of the panel will be available next week, but here are some pictures:

Elise Nordling, Brian Zisk, Rich Bengloff, Rusty Hodge, Chris MacDonald"

Rich Bengloff of A2IM and Sound Exchange board member talks with Rusty Hodge from SomaFM"

Rusty Hodge answering questions after the panel"

Here's what we learned from this panel: there is so much confusion in the legal use of using music online. Most people don't even know where to begin. Everyone wants to use music (and license and even pay for it) but it's not being "sold" in a way they can deal with it.

We could have done a whole day on the different sub-topics. People want to know. There are lots of people who want to use music online, and legally can't or don't know how to. So they end up just doing it illegally.

Note to music industry: start selling your product in a way that people want to buy it. Or they won't bother to buy it!

Remote Broadcasting Lessons Learned

2008-03-10T01:42:00.001-07:00

I though it would be great for SomaFM to do a lot of live coverage from SXSW this year- after all, it's one of the biggest music and media festivals in the world. So I had some grand plans, many which have failed so far.

Plan number one:

Live webcams looking at the Six Street club area, as well as looking at the convention center and Brush Square Park. We have the cameras; we secured places to locate them in the Courtyard hotel next to the convention center. Alas, we didn't expect a total failure of the hotel's ethernet network system. And our backup plan didn't expect the hotel's wireless system to become overloaded and crash multiple times a day.

In fact it's a good thing that I have a Sprint EVDO card to get wide area wireless access to the internet, or I'd have no internet connectivity at all. But even Sprint's EVDO network is getting overloaded during peak hours (e.g. 10am-midnight local time). Today, it took about 30 minutes to upload 30 photos, when it should have taken 2-3 minutes. Plan number two: Live "Austin Audio" from above Sixth Street. The street sounds here in Austin have to be heard to be believed. And I though it would be really cool to do a live broadcast of the sound of Austin from the hotel a block off Sixth street. So I brought a couple of portable streaming encoders with us, and some stereo microphones to mount on the balcony outside the hotel room. Except that there were no rooms at the hotel with a balcony, and worse yet, no opening windows in the room! So scratch that plan.

Plan number three:

Quickly edit the podcasts, interviews, and band recordings each night on the laptop and upload before morning. The problem here is that we normally use ProTools for doing all our editing and audio production, but since ProTools won't work on OSX 10.5, I couldn't run it on my laptop. (SomaFM has one dedicated "audio production" machine that runs ProTools and also has the master music library on it; but this machine has to run OSX 10.4.x for ProTools.) I ended up installing a copy of Logic, but since I haven't used it much, there has been a learning curve that I hoped would have been faster. Also, some of the audio processing plugins we use with ProTools weren't licensed for use on a laptop.

Plan number four:

Broadcast the Bay Area Takeover party on Thursday live. OK, this one might still happen but given the way things are going, I'm not expecting it to work. We are still going to try. I used to scoff at the NPR guys when they'd send a crew of 5 people to SXSW to report on it. There are 3 people from SomaFM here, but two of those people (Merin and Elise) are also here on behalf of their day jobs and have to give 2/3rds of their time to that. What we needed was an audio production person to do the first passes at editing all the material we're recording. Maybe next time we'll bring an intern. :-)

In retrospect, here's what I think would have made things work a lot better:

Get a couple EVDO to WiFi+Ethernet routers, so we don't have to rely on internet from the hotels or venues at all. And bring plenty of ethernet cabling, as you may not be able to rely on the wireless networks.

Bring at least one extra laptop for processing pictures and audio.

Bring extra batteries for the digital recorders!

Arrive a couple days early to test everything... arriving 24 hours before the event starts won't give you enough time to get everything ready.

Have one person who's job it to just provide production support - and who doesn't go to the panels and conference itself - someone whose only job is to get the stuff posted and edited.

I wonder how this list will change in the next few days... we're basically winging it at this point.

SXSW blogging has moved....

2008-03-08T14:36:00.001-08:00

SomaFM's SXSW Blog has moved to this new address.