Internet DX

My hacker friend, Greg, was, as usual, down in his basement cyber-dungeon when I stopped by to visit the other day. His wife pointed at the basement door, saying, "You know where to go. If there was a refrigerator and a bathroom down there, I'd never see him."

It's impossible to predict what Greg's up to. One day he might be trying to make an old Apple //e talk to his Linux box, and the next teaching a G4/400 to open his garage door with a voice command. That's what makes him so interesting.

Greg was sitting in his well-worn swivel chair, with four monitors and three keyboards in front of him, listening to some sort of Chinese-sounding music. He looked up as I came down the stairs, and said, "Listen to this! It's music coming from central Africa."

"Yeah, I hear it. Somebody's torturing a cat. Must be an acquired taste."

Taking my not-so-subtle hint, he clicked it off. "You've never met my father, have you? He'll love this!"

"Okay, so somebody has to like it."

"Back when I was a little kid, when he was young, he would have been called a hacker–if they'd called people that back then." He paused, clicked and turned on some German rock music before continuing. "People who are interested in electronic gadgets these days tinker with computers. Back then it was ham radio and shortwave. My father used to be a ham and a DXer."

"I know all about that, my father was really into ham radio. Our back yard had so much antenna wire in the air, it's amazing we made it through any lightning storms without getting nuked."

Looking not too surprised, he observed "Must be something genetic here. Our yard was like that too. Do you know about DXing?"

"Yeah, DX must stand for 'distance listening' or something like that. I remember my dad and some of his friends getting excited about grabbing an obscure station out of the static and then tweaking the BFO knob so the single sideband signal didn't sound so much like someone without a tongue trying to talk Danish."

Greg clicked with his mouse, and the BBC news came on.

"Did you know that ham radio's something of a dying hobby? The average age of the hams keeps creeping up because so many of the young would-be hams latch onto computers instead. My wife says the computers latch onto them."

"So, what will your father love...the music?"

"You can DX with a computer too! There are thousands of radio stations from all over the world streaming their programming over the Internet." He clicked again, and folk music started. "But, this is a lot easier than DXing with radio."

After another click, the familiar sound of All Things Considered began. Not wanting to appear totally ignorant, I said, "I've been doing this for a couple of years. All the major-league baseball teams use Real Audio to stream their radio broadcasts onto the Internet. For a few summers I've been putting games on in the background while I work in my office. I look at the schedule to find the most interesting game, and click it in. Yahoo has a page with all the links and game times."

Greg clicked into the Grateful Dead and mused, "There are Deadheads all over the 'Net. I've run across at least four sites that do nothing but stream old Dead concerts, commercial-free, twenty-four hours every day. Jerry Garcia is dead, but the Dead live! Anybody with a good Internet connection and sound to pump out can set up their own Internet radio station. There are lots of really bad wannabe DJs out there! But, if there's something you like to hear, it's out there somewhere."

We listened to the Dead doing a pretty good job on, strangely enough, Me and Bobby McGee. I recalled, "Last winter, during that long, cold darkness between baseball seasons, I listened to a really good dramatization of The Lord of the Rings. It sounded like it was originally one of those BBC productions, but I don't know who was streaming it. They sent it beginning to end over and over again–all twenty or so hours. You just had to jump in wherever it happened to be in the story. It took me a couple of months to hear the whole thing from Hobbiton to the Cracks of Doom and back."

After another click, we were listening to a commentator in Sydney talking about the Olympics that were then taking place. Greg remarked, "You know, I didn't do this very much before I got a cable Internet connection. It sort of works over a 56K modem, but usually sounds like someone playing an AM radio at the other end of a long pipe. Many of the stream servers assume you've got faster than 56K, so if you're still running on a modem, there are annoying pauses while your player stops to refill its buffer. With cable or DSL, it sounds pretty good!"

After listening to the Australians complain about the antics of the American basketball Dream Team, I complained, "The biggest problem I've had with streaming is all the different formats. The most common by far is Real Audio, but QuickTime is getting more common, Windows Media Player format is annoyingly prevalent, and of course SHOUTcast.com has thousands of streams in MP3 format. You need different programs to play the streams. And it's pretty hard to find out what's available without spending all your time surfing."

"I know all about that," Greg replied. "Right now, I use the freeware Real Audio and QuickTime players for their own formats and MACAST Lite for MP3 streams. It used to be a lot more confusing until I got this little program."

He wiggled the mouse over a window on the left-most monitor and I leaned forward. The window had the snappy title Aladdin Tuner 3.0—The Global Internet Receiver for Your Mac! "See this little map here. I can click anywhere on it and it'll show me a bunch of stations in that country. When I click on a station, it runs a player for that station and starts the stream. You can even search by format–news, rock, jazz…"

"But, how does it know about stations?"

"Aladdin has a big database of Internet streams that they update about once per month. The Tuner can grab the database to stay current. Right now the database has 3500 or so entries. They even list surprising things like the traffic control at JFK airport in New York. It has audio and video streams, but I don't mess with video very much because the real-time video feeds still look like jerky moving postage stamps to me–the 'Net isn't quite fast enough for video, yet."

"The Lord of the Rings QuickTime movie trailer is pretty impressive," I objected.

"I agree it's gorgeous, but it's sort of cheating because it's not real-time. They probably spent days on a fast G4 compressing and hinting the video so it would stream cleanly. Even then, it only works well with a fast connection. Try watching one of Jobs' MacWorld keynotes live, if you want to see what I'm talking about."

He clicked another button on the window and a pretty standard CD/MP3 player popped up. "This program has other tricks. It has a bare-bones MP3 and CD player, and can get on the Internet CDDB database to look up your CD song titles and stuff. The MP3 player looks like an afterthought and needs improvement because it's clearly not playing in the same league as other programs such as MACAST and Audion–it pauses once in a while like it can't keep up.

"The biggest problem I've had is that too many of the links in the database are dead. Most of the time it's because the URL for the server was changed after the entry was made. There's no really good way to avoid this, but it is annoying. Most of the entries also have Web links, so you can easily track down the changes.

"But, there are a huge number of other streaming sites that Aladdin Tuner doesn't even try to list. Take a look at SHOUTcast.com or Live365.com, for example. They have tens of thousands of regular people who've set up their own servers. Since they come and go almost daily, nobody can keep track of them. It looks like the Tuner database mostly lists commercial radio stations and other professional sites. Of course, it will keep track of your favorite bookmarks."

We spent the rest of the evening audio-surfing the world, while Greg outlined his plans for putting a bathroom into the basement.

Aladdin tuner is available for online purchase straight from Aladdin (www.aladdinsys.com). A free 30-day trial is available for download, after which the $29.95 purchase price must be paid.

Louisville Computer Society

The speaker at the November 28 LCS meeting will be Apple's Advisory Systems Engineer, Greg Willmore. Although the topic of his presentation has not yet been announced, he will probably demo the latest and greatest from Apple just in time for Christmas.

The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the Web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.

The LCS also sponsors an e-mail discussion list devoted to Macintosh topics. To join, send e-mail containing only the words "subscribe macgroup" to majordomo@erdos.math.louisville.edu.

[ Previous Article | Next Article | Index of Articles]

/home2/lee/www/cgi-bin/textcounterdata/ [TextCounter Fatal Error: Could Not Write to File __lee_macwritings_LCN0011_shtml]