LAUG 2.0 News

NiceCast software is probably the most affordable & easy program out there for your Power PC or Intel Mac to have the capability to streamline audio through the internet, playable in any PC or MAC audio program. Not only that, but it will archive whatever you stream, saving it as a music file of your choice at what sample & bitrate you choose, even if it’s different than your stream settings. Futhermore, if you choose to purchase a serial, you have the option of listing your stream on macstreams.com, and get your music out to a curious audience of usually a couple dozen to over a hundred listeners at any given time. It helps greatly if you have at least a half dozen friends &/or family tuned in for your station to get any notice or a decent placement in the search.
There are no recommended system requirements for the Nicecast, other than operating system, & a high speed internet connection. I ran the program on both Tiger & Panther, and on a 400mhz G4 system with a 1gb of pc 100 ram, & a G4 800 emac with 1gb of pc 133 ram. I have the fortune of being in Time Warner Cable’s footprint, with a fairly good high speed connection. When it comes to streaming, it’s actually the upload that you’ll want to have plenty of speed in, using different speed tests, mine averaged at about 440kb/s. By comparison, my download is usually just under 5mbs. Having your own server is optional, since nicecast offers a free one.
First run, on my emac, was to one listener, my friend Travis. I decided to use some high settings for an audio mix that i played through a griffen powerwave composit, a 100 dollar usb 2.0 device (backward compatible), which lets you input analogue audio from any source, mine being a mixer, into your computer. Nicecast gives you the obtion of streaming from 3 different types of sources, system audio, external usb/firewire devices, & applications. Since this is a stereo music session, I set it at a bitrate of 128 kbs and a sample rate at 44.1khz, & began an archive session at the same settings. This was done on a weeknight, and I used nicecast’s macstreams server. The “share” tab on nicecast gives you the URL for both people online and on your own network. Travis tried the url in Windows Media Player to no luck, he then put it in WinAmp and successfully logged on (he was on a PC). The url will not work unless you begin broadcasting, and stopping will boot people, essentially, and they will have to restart the stream after you begin broadcasting again. I didn’t play long, but Travis said nothing but good things about the quality of the stream.
Second run, I tried on the g4 powermac, with half as much processing power. I also tried it on a Saturday night, where nicecast’s server was being used by many more broadcasters and listeners. At the same settings as before, I was told I’ve had a terrible choppiness. So I stopped the broadcast and lowered the settings. Still choppy, so i stopped archiving, i closed my browser (your browser will take up quite a bit of your internet connection), and lowered the settings some more. I also allotted more CPU Usage/Quality, although I’m not sure what good this setting does for the stream. The final verdict was choppy, but not as bad. Ultimately, I think the lowest i was set at was 64kbs bitrate with a 32khz sample rate, still using stereo, this was music, after all. This was a rather frustrating session, if I couldn’t archive it, I couldn’t save it for playback later, which was something I was looking forward to. And even if I did archive it, the quality was poor enough to be upset. Another thing I noticed this session, is that I had a maximum of 8 listeners, but could not have more tuned in. The more popular stations on macstreams can have up to 100 listeners. I do not know if this is something that you pay for at macstreams, or if it is based on popularity, and if i had all 8 listeners tuned in one night, I might be able to have 20 listeners the next evening. Both rogue ameoba’s website an macstreams did not have readily available explanations for these, & I decided it didn’t really matter to me, since the most listeners I ever hoped for were like 2 or 3 freinds.
I did a final 75 minute broadcast more recently with 3 friends tuning in for me. It was a Thursday night and macstreams wasn’t as busy as other evenings. At my favorite high settings, I had maybe one or two skips/chops, and all of it archived! I also tried the mono setting at the end of the night, talking through a microphone connected via an maudio mobile preamp. The voice quality was extroidinary! Much better than expected. Proving that nicecast would probably serve best as a voice broadcasting system. Although I’m sure if you used your own server and had a bit better system than mine, and a very expensive internet service providing upstreams over 1mb, broadcasting and archiving at sample rates as high as 360 to 100 listeners would be no problem at all.
If you’re looking to have your own online radio station, you’ll find that nicecast will be a good start. You will be limited when it comes to listeners, as macstreams offered no more than 100 for even it’s most popular broadcasters. But again, it does give you the option of using your own server. You’ll also hesitate to broadcast at higher sample rates unless you’re dedicating all of your internet connection to it, even if you live in an area with a more expensive consumer internet options, you’ll notice that those increase your download by another 3 or 4 megabyles a second, but your uploads might gain no more than 100 kilobites a second. You can archive as you mix live, then restart your broadcast and have an itunes library folder dedicated to replaying your archived sets while you’re away. As of now, nicecast does not give the option of switching audio sources during broadcast (it would be a great addition for future versions!) You will not be able to have friends at other computers add to your broadcast stream, because the nicecast url is computer specific, so your ‘guest dj’ will have to physically be your guest, and using your same computer or internet connection. For those of you who intend to broadcast voice only, you’ll have little or no problems with quality of your feeds using nicecast’s server alone, but again, you will have a limit to how many listeners you can have at once.
The podcast thinks it’s beat out the significance of radio, but that’s not true at all. The broadcast is communal, one source, several listeners. But one thing in common, it’s all happening right then, in the moment. Using a chatroom or im communicator you can get feedback, it brings you together, enjoying the very moment. It’s definately cool, and nicecast is an affordable, easy, and fun way to be the source of such an experience.

Jeremiah Zentz
eternalvibe radio
http://72.128.59.121:8000/listen.m3u

Fire the Phone Company by Dave Field

The title sounds pretty enticing…how to fire the phone company. The book is about Voice Over IP, or VoIP, which is a technology that allows voice chat over the Internet. Even though the book is copyright 2006, it really felt dated. That’s probably because this is such a fast moving field. No mention was made of some of the more innovative products out today such as the usb flash based phone from Vonage nor any info about Skype being bought by ebay. Unfortunately, the book also completely ignored Apple’s very high quality entry into VoIP—iChat AV.

The book’s subtitle is “A Handy Guide to Voice Over IP.” Not to nitpick, but I wouldn’t call it a guide, rather a overview. The book gave the reader a brief yet complex overview of the history of VoIP communications. The book took a simple straightforward subject and overwhelmed the reader with hundreds of acronyms (I actually started counting). Most of the acronyms, while interesting, are completely impractical as a guide. These acronyms have little usage for the average person wanting to dump the phone company. In addition, I think the book unnecessarily scared readers away from using VoIP. Too much time was spent on technical details such as home wiring or firewalls. In reality, this stuff generally works out of the box with little configuration from the user.

Based on the cover and title, I expected more of a guide on what options for VoIP were out there and which company would be right for me. Field did provide a chapter on how to compare VoIP companies, but left all the research to the reader. While I respect that if he included recommendations, they might change by presstime, but too often in the book instead of offering practical advice, he simply suggested that readers use Google to do their own research.

Personally, ever time I’ve used VoIP solutions, they work! I didn’t have to configure firewalls, check the wiring in my house, it worked like a charm. Same for any customer I’ve worked with. I almost wondered…does he work for the phone company…and is he being paid to scare readers. I don’t think he researched his subject very well, and he based all his recommendations on personal experience. Again, this stuff isn’t rocket science. I can confidentially say it’s harder to secure a wireless router than to chat with someone over the internet

Field did do a decent job of giving readers who want to switch to VoIP descriptions of realistic problems and how to handle them, most notably how to establish 911 access and how to switch your land line number to your VoIP number.

Buy this book if you need a historical overview of VoIP for your computer classes, but as a guide for someone wanting to switch to making phone calls over the Internet—avoid this book because it will needlessly scare you.

Pros: Great if you own stock in AT&T/SBC, as people will be afraid to fire the phone company
Cons: Endless fear mongering and complexity inaccurately portrays the ease in which you can fire the phone company

2 out of 5 DogCows

Link for more information on Amazon.com

A podcast from the October meeting of the Lawrence Apple Users Group. This month’s topic included information about Mac OSX Server by BestMacs’s CEO Brian Best. Check us out on the web and subscribe to the podcast at http://www.laugks.org/news/.

 

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Leo Laporte’s Guide to Mac OS X Tiger

by Leo Laporte, Todd Stauffer

Celebrity endorsements can be both good and bad. When it’s a grill, an endorsement by George Foreman tends to work out. When OJ Simpson endorses you’re car rental service it’s bad. Given the general high quality of Leo Laporte’s podcast and TV shows, I had high hopes for this book. I was woefully disappointed. Same thing happened when I bought sneakers endorsed by a basketball star and my game didn’t improve at all. The book was really writeen by Todd Stauffer based on the screen shots of his Mac. Apparently Leo didn’t have too much involvement, just like that famous basketball player probably had little to say about the shoes with his name on it.

First, the book was very difficult to read from a design perspective. Looking at a page it was nearly impossible to find what you want. Anyone ever heard of the tab function or indentation. These tips are from Design 101..use your margins and indentations to emphasise certain points and organize them on the page. In addition, the table of contents and flow of the book was very confusing. A good intro book takes it for the User’s Experience perspective: start with the beginning when you turn on the mac and setup up a user account, and then setup email, and so on. Leo’s book starts with the essoteric aspects of the Finder. If you are a new user, that’s not very helpful until you understand more about your Mac and if you are an intermediate user, you already know this stuff. Finally, the book didn’t include enough screen pictures, and the screen pictures that were included were not very helpful. I wish I could tell you what pattern was used to determine what was pictures worthy and what wasn’t. Including pictures in a book help break up long text areas and the pictures get associated somehow with the topic being discussed. In this book, the pictures were not used to help balance the text nor did the layout effective use the pictures to illustrate the text being dicussed.

From a technical perspective, the book did a mediocare job of explaining Mac topics. Typical of many technical books, the book explained topics in a way that novice users wouldn’t understand and intermediate users would be insulted by. Granted, it’s a thin line to walk: explain it straightforward enough that a novice will understand it but insightful enough that an intermediate user would appreciate and learn from it. At least Todd and Leo aren’t alone in their failures. A great example is multihoming. Multihoming is an advanced way of using mutliple network connections. A novice would unlikely care about it and a intermediate user wasn’t given an explanation of how to set up multihoming–only that it exists.

Worst of all, this book is just plain wrong in some area. In the troubleshooting chapter, Todd recommends running Norton Utilities when you have problems. What? Norton Utilities is not compatible with Tiger. That’s been known since Tiger came out. He also indicates that hardware problems with kernel panics are usually related to drivers and never considers that hardware may be bad or incompatible. Those are some serious errors. Granted it’s only a few errors, but errors bad enough that a computer could be rendered unusable after taking some of his advise.

Generally, this is a below average introduction to Mac OS X Tiger.

Pros: Not terribly expensive, a quick read
Cons: Hard to read and understand. Technical errors and inconsistent topic depth

2 out of 5 dogcows

Click here for more information on Amazon.com

A podcast from the September meeting of the Lawrence Apple Users Group. This month’s topic included Podcasting by Podcast411’s President Robert Walch. Check us out on the web and subscribe to the podcast at http://www.laugks.org/news/.

 

 Enhanced Podcast [104:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (11)