WG/radio/min-jun-04-2012

Introductions

• Eden: I'm from FSU, and am interested in recording a show off-site (perhaps live too) and sending those in. I'm also the contact for Diamond Dave in San Fransisco who is interested in syndication.
• David: I host the FSU show on Wednesday nights, and am slowly developing rudimentary producer skills.
• Linda: I create the show "The Bridge" with Janet which is on Friday. I'm one of the people who pushed for this meeting because I'm frustrated with how we're doing meetings.
• Bob: I do Veterans for Peace and numerous other things.
• Carlos: I want to produce an hour long show each week.
• Patrick: We do a show "Commonwealth Casino"
• Raymond: I do the "Aggregated Occupier" each Friday and 2, and would like to help with more production.
• Sarah: I do lots of things. I love this! It's too much for me to do myself.
• Michael: I've been facilitating OB GA, and my favorite GA was the one where OBR got $2,000. It got me to rethink about getting involved in radio, so I came to find out what was going on.
• Kendra: I've been doing some citizen's journalism, I have a show on Friday about civil liberties issues.
• Brandon: I do tech things.

Where we are right now

• A producer is:
  • Because we had some people who didn't want to get involved in tech stuff.
  • We also discovered that doing all the tech stuff by yourself, live, can be very difficult, particularly if you want to play clips, take call-ins, etc.
• Can you go through, just simply, where we're at and what we've been doing generally? The different components that lead us to get on the air.
  • Sarah: I can talk about what I actually know.
    • We operate fully and completely using a tool called BUTT. When we had set up BUTT, I think the idea was that it was a temporary things, or at least a component. BUTT was never supposed to be our end all, or everything, but it's become that. The issue with BUTT is that when butt is not playing, we're playing our loop, which is a bunch of really old audio. It was great in the beginning, but at the present moment we're running thirteen shows a week. That means that BUTT doesn't really serve our purposes any more. Most of our shows broadcast from the studio (a particular expection is Caulkthewagon which broadcasts from Matt's house). The loop is a problem, that pretty much everybody hates. What we decided a while ago that we'd create a local playlist here on the studio computer.
    • I feel like a lot of userstand the frustrations and problems from the email list and I'd like to work on what can work.
    • Raymond: I'm going to give a demonstration about how everybody has the ability to do this. Here's my radio station [shows on computer]. Here's a schedule, and here's a list of all the shows, and each have a playlist, archive, and blog. The question is how does it work? We work with a company call museter.com. It shows what's played recently, number of listeners, other technical stuff. They give people who run stations 5 GB of storage for whatever audio they want. So when we're not running the schedule, it runs a playlist of reruns. During the weekend when there's a schedule I run the station from my house, I use this program called macampx, which is basically like an empty playlist. If I plug in a microphone I can use this program to connect to museter and talk live, and mix that with recorded files if that's what we want. It costs $25/mo.
    • Let's talk money for a second, we have $80/mo coming into our accounts pretty reliabely. We're good on rent to July, and we have $690 in our account.
    • What about podcasting?
      • That's different. There are a couple solutions floating around like archive.org. I'm going to set up an account for FSU there and experiment with it.
      • Brandon has a WIP for this as well.
    • Whether we choose to move to museter or airtime pro or whatever, I am concerned with the logistics of a rollout to a new system. And I'm particularly worried about it if brandon is saying he's going to no help us anymore.
      • Brandon: I'm not going to drop off the face of earth, I'm just going to now want to maintain museter specifically*** Whether we choose to move to museter or airtime pro or whatever, I am concerned with the logistics of a rollout to a new system. And I'm particularly worried about it if brandon is saying he's going to no help us anymore.
      • Brandon: I'm not going to drop off the face of earth, I'm just going to now want to maintain museter specifically.
    • What we have right now doesn't work right, whether it's something that we have to pay for or not, as long as we're ok moving forward, and that it's ok moving forward to a system that works.
    • POI: I just wanted to point out that we use things like Google Voice & Calendar which aren't open source.

Our next steps

• We help a vote on migrating to the museter service. It passed, so now we've got to pick a weekend to do the migration.
• Brandon: I suspect the migration will take these steps: 1) pay for the service, 2) upload files, 3) reconfigure butt, 4) we're good to go.
• Sarah: maybe we should do it the weekend after next.
• Alex: I'd really like to get this process started asap, even the first playlist was only five shows or whatever.
• Maybe we should have a teach-in so people can learn to use museter.
  • Raymond: I'd like to volunteer to do some of that stuff.
• Brandon: I suggest we buy in asap and start getting content uploaded & people trained, but not move over for a couple weeks.
• Brandon: I'm also slightly converned with IT security of sharing usernames/password.
  • A solution for this might be to have a personal relationship with the people who run the service.
• Raymond is going to email Dennis from Museter and ask a couple questions, then we'll ask Greg to make the purchase.