Hepl from radio folks!

[wafl]

So I volunteer at a campus/community radio station and we're trying to put together broadcasts of live music, sort of like what you'd see on KEXP. So I've been trying to devise some scheme to get the sounds from real life to cyber space so we can stream it to the broadcast studio(which is too small for a band) and then off to the airwaves.

So far the best I've come up with is: Interface -> DAW(Reaper) -> Voxengo recorder as a VST plugin -> Virtual audio cable -> Butt (I shit you not this is what the streaming program we use is called) -> Then butt streams via ice cast to our server which we access via the computer in the broadcast studio.

The benefit to this is that we can record the audio so that we can make videos of the performance to post online as well as mixing the songs for any bands that want since a lot of bands can't afford studio time or their own equipment. I figure it would be a good service for the local scene so that bands can have semi professional recordings. I'd like to eventually get a little mastering suite so we can provide them fully done tracks that they can use as a demo or even sell, but now I'm getting off topic. Does anybody have any better suggestions at all since I'm pretty certain I might have missed something? Help me obi fuzz kenobi, you're my only hope.

[DRodriguez]

Hiya, that's what I do for a living.

I would highly recommend not doing any mixing in a computer for live broadcast work. You run a lot of risk of it crashing and getting dead air. So either do in the box pre records, or do as analog as possible live.

If possible, get an old mackie 32 channel board or something similar and mix as analog as possible before converting it to digital. Or get an old used digital console, Yamaha makes fairly good ones, but get something as focused on live as possible

Make the digital pipe to air as simple as possible. A digital mixer will likely have various digital outs that will play nicely with your system.

[wafl]

Thx! That's awesome that you do it for a living. That's hopefully what I can manage one day.

That's initially what we were trying to do but we were getting a ton of distortion in the stream's audio. I think the streaming software can only take 2 channels and the mixer we have is acting like an interface, so the audio is sent into the computer in 10 channels. I guess ideally we would want a mixer that sends only the master into the computer and not each individual channel pre fader, but I'm not sure if we have the budget for that. Maybe one of the commercial stations will upgrade and donate their old equipment to us.

I've been pushing for pre records and I think its getting some traction so maybe it will all be moot. Tho there is something to be said for the pressure of doing everything live, and I think its more fun for the bands.