How we made the radio, and why we want to fly

For the seventh year we have been doing the project, without bright ups and downs. This project is an internet radio. We are often asked why we are doing this, for whom, and why for so long, if nobody knows about us - this prompted me to write this article.

How it all began.
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I like music. At the institute, I chopped up in an unknown heavy band on an electric guitar, then for several years wrote music on trackers, and after trackers, I became a DJ, better known among friends than anywhere else. We played our own music on guitars, without a vocalist, and I wrote on trackers in an indefinite electronic style, telling everyone that I invented my own. With DJ it was easier - minimal, idm, did not have to invent anything.

My friend loves music too. So much so that almost his entire adult life he worked as an administrator in nightclubs. This gave him a great opportunity to communicate with a variety of musicians. He is well versed in music, in all directions, read a lot of books, and in general is very well versed (unlike me). He knows many musicians whom nobody knows.

We met a long time ago, in the vastness of not the most popular FTN network. We met and became friends, despite the fact that we lived in different cities. One day, we talked about the fact that there are many unpopular musicians living in Russia who write to the table, who are terribly talented, but about whom no one knows anything. This was the first brick that formed the foundation of our project.

The thoughts about the radio came to me at the moment when I played in the forest on open air. It was on the shore of the night lake - I suddenly saw people who want to listen to music and after I have the strength to put it. As it turned out, by that time my friend had long been delirious with the idea of ​​his own radio, occasionally returning to a local FM radio station with its own program. He immediately supported this idea, especially since by that time he had already opened a network music label, and actively communicated with musicians whose music could be put on the air.

Since I worked as a network engineer, and knew well what Cisco was, FreeBSD, and how the Internet works, I immediately picked up a shoutcast server, created the first playlist of my favorite tracks, and asked my future colleague to help with music.

Thus was born the radio station verdure , which was based on a simple philosophy:

• Very often we listen to musicians, friends and acquaintances whom no one listens to. We are very happy to share this music.
• We did not find any radio stations in the network that we could turn on at that very moment. Everybody has this moment of their own - someone writes code under us, someone prepares for sleep, and someone sits and looks out the window. We try to prepare that saving drink of comfort and tranquility that always stands and waits for it to be taken from the shelf.

What happened next.



When the first listeners came to us, we wanted new dimensions, and we began to go on the air - sometimes I brought the music out of the house, and a friend invited his friends to play with him. Then I met one of the creators of the pirate station in the Moscow region, and we worked for some time in the FM band, naturally, illegally.

The next team member joined when we had the idea to make regular broadcasts with microphones. We liked this idea so much that we bought a separate remote and microphones, and friends brought their old headphones. We went on the air 25 times, took calls, talked, argued, swore - that was our favorite program, Logia . All our friends visited us, it was very cool, and maybe someday we will start to do it again.

Generally, it’s very nice to make your own radio, almost everyone who can, helps as much as possible - with design, ideas, technology, and we cannot rightly say that this radio makes someone specific - at different stages with their ideas, effort, time shared by many. And this was our main success - friendship and communication.

For example, we ask everyone who has the opportunity to record in another country “You listen to such and such radio” in the local language, after which one of our brilliant comrade-in-arms (whom no one has seen) makes wonderful jingles .

A few months ago, we celebrated our sixth birthday, and move on.

However, despite the six-year history, the number of simultaneous listeners is small, 10-40 people. But this does not bother us at all - many of our listeners have been with us for several years, and it doesn’t matter to us how many there are. We do not expect that someday we will wake up famous, and talk about us. We make a radio that we listen to ourselves, and if someone else listens to it, this is the top of what we could count on.

Maybe this is also because it is almost a home project, and we do it unprofessionally. One day, right before the live broadcast, I went down after a friend to help him bring in two turntables, and the door slammed behind me. It was the evening of December 30 :) For two hours we sat with turntables on the staircase and waited for a locksmith, and the neighbors congratulated us on the coming one. Naturally, almost all those who deliberately gathered for this broadcast did not master the two-hour wait. At another home studio, less responsive neighbors simply turned off the electrical panel during a performance — they probably didn’t like the vibrating bass.

Some technical details.



We have an internal and external shoutcast servers, two tape drives, and a playlist management system. When we upload a new file to the server, it is added to the track database, after which it can be included in one of the daily playlists. In total, we have 7 playlists, for each day of the week - this allows us to update the music neatly and without haste, and create content depending on the day of the week. After the next playlist is compiled and “converged” (its length is exactly 24 hours), it is uploaded by the pls file to the server. Once a day, the first streamer picks up this playlist and starts streaming it to an internal server. This is the simplest streamer on Perl, it does not recode anything, it only pours the stream, and its main advantage is that it can switch to a new playlist without stopping the broadcast. Thus, we have an internal server on which the weekly schedule is constantly running. But it would be irresponsible to hook users there, as with any stream switching (for example, when a DJ is turned on, or any online broadcast) users would be disconnected from the stream. Therefore, a more sophisticated streamer takes the stream from the internal server, recodes it to the desired quality, and pours it onto the external server, from where it is already parsed by users. This second streamer can receive the connection from the DJ, and return back to streaming from the internal server, also without interrupting the broadcast. Not very elegant, but it works quite stably. We can be, someday, we will rebuild everything on an icecast and seriously simplify the scheme. I know that in the 21st century, both in the icecast and shoutcast there are declared opportunities to switch streams on the fly, but in practice we constantly had problems with it.

I am not a designer or a programmer (actually, I’m a network engineer), so the design and layout of the site are far from what we would like to see ideally. The engine is sluggishly written in php, and the site is still being mapped to vi. The interface does not shine with intuitiveness either - our users will not know about all the capabilities of the site right away, and when they have an interest to click on everything they haven’t heard yet. We like to think that this is our feature - the radio turns its face gradually. Some can not even start the broadcast, and we patiently answer “click on nature”. Nature, by the way, is updated every month, following the seasons. This turned out to be a very difficult action for an Internet project - tearing off a physical ass, and once a month heading to the forest with a camera.

Instead of a conclusion.



We have learned to distribute responsibilities within our micro-collective, and we replace each other in difficult times - the radio cannot wait, it must live and breathe always. Despite the almost completely Russian-language chat, they listen to us from such corners of the planet that we have to open a map in order to understand where it is. Our live broadcasts are very rare, and the listeners, who are unaccustomed to their voices on the air, are always surprised that there is someone here. One of the failed strategy points is to provide a platform for performances for all talented musicians and DJs. The tiny size of the audience cuts off those who need real popularity, but we are pleased that several interesting teams have taken advantage of our invitation.

We try our best not to adhere to a certain format - the division of music into styles, this is the ugliest invention of humanity. If we try to describe the music that we play, then I would say that we are trying to create an atmosphere of comfort and peace for the mind. It will be very cool if you are looking for something like this - we will be happy if our small project will gain some more new listeners.

One day, our friend walked through a hipster flea market in Finland, and came across two sleepy Finns who drank tea and listened to our station on small speakers. At such moments, we want to fly, and never throw a favorite project.