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Projects: Metropolitan Washington Ear
MiniDisc Replacement |
Digital Automation |
Live Audio Stream |
Archive Audio Stream
The Metropolitan Washington Ear's radio reading service is on a subcarrier of a local radio station in the Washington, DC area. In order to reach a larger audience, including those outside the coverage area of the radio station, the Ear decided to webcast their air signal simultaneously. A rack-mount machine was constructed and installed at a local ISP, running Microsoft Windows NT WorkStation. Windows was chosen over a variant of Linux because the Ear's sysadmin was already familiar with NT. The RealAudio format was chosen because, at the time, RealNetworks had players available for far more operating systems than Windows Media, Quicktime, or ShoutCast. RealNetwork RealServer and RealProducer programs were installed on the machine, and it was configured to accept incoming encoded audio streams only from itself. Wilson WindowWare Winbatch was again used to create a custom program to monitor the encoding program for errors. If at any time the server software refused to accept data from the encoding software, the monitor program would terminate the encoder and restart it. The program was also made to run at machine startup incase of a power outage. The machine would simply reboot, launch the encoder software, and begin streaming again, all without user intervention. Since the machine was not physically located at the Ear, a remote administration tool was required. Rather than use a commercial program such as PC Anywhere or Timbuktu, VNC (Virtual Network Computing) from AT&T Labs Cambridge was chosen for it's ease of use, and the fact that it can be used through a browser as opposed to needing the client software installed on the controlling machine. Products used in this project can be found at the following locations:
