XRT-FM HUGE Announcement!

Folks, due to your insights and advice, as well as some other research, we are changing the whole thing! At a to be announced date, XRT-FM will be transforming into…

All Country, KXRT: The Cimarron!

Yes! All Country, all the hits! We will stay the course for having no commercials, and minimal interruptions, but best of all… Only 100% pure Country!

Rascal Flatts, George Strait, Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, and on and on! Believe me, folks, you will not want to miss a single minute of some of the best music in the USA!

Stay glued to this blog and the current XRT-FM homepage for more plans as they develop. If anyone out there is talented and would like to donate a new logo for the new station, please email me: xrtfm[at]marinifamily[dot]org. I’m looking for a nice western motif, prairie scenes, rolling hills, a cactus, good earthy tones. Thanks!

We will need to change this blog to the new address as well as the current homepage, we will keep these up until a time where the transition is well enough on the way.

I’m so excited about these changes! I hope we can entertain and delight you all with this new programming! Stay with us, you’ll see!

-Timmy

XRT-FM Testing!

Tune your media players to http://216.83.140.146:8850/listen.pls

Don’t expect much yet. We are testing different playback and crossfading methods. It may sound crummy. If you have suggestions on how we should do this on a zero budget better, please comment!

-Timmy

We’re coming back soon!

Folks… I know it’s been the pits with us being “off the air” for so long. I’ve been really itching to get it all going again. I was able to detach a bit and do some other things instead of focusing so hard on the station. This lets my brain cool off a bit and hopefully culture some more creativity and good ideas.

I am toying with some ideas. Perhaps changing the name of the station… Perhaps being all country except an 80’s day on Mondays… Just throwing a few ideas around my head.

As always, let me know your thoughts and ideas.

-Timmy

Temporary Hiatus

Folks,

I am sorry. Due to some seen and some unforeseen circumstances, XRT-FM will be taking a temporary break. Without being too descriptive, it basically is an issue of security and stress relief. The security lies in the fact that I have been seeing some suspicious activity on my network lately. I’ve had my server rebooted or brought down mysteriously. For the time being, I’ve closed all the ports on my network and killed the SHOUTCast server. Stress relief is my own sanity. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into trying to integrate iTunes into the broadcast. I haven’t had the success I was hoping for and have decided it’s time for a break for myself, too.

Thank you for your support and patience. I will get this thing going.. I might have to sink a little money into this project to assist in the effort to improve the station’s sound for you (and me!).

-Timmy

XRT-FM 2.0 Beta Project Update

Folks,

I have come to determine, for the time being, that using iTunes for music delivery is not a really good solution. There are a lot of pros to doing this but some of the cons are too over-powering to convince me to go with it as a complete solution. Meanwhile, I am still importing all the music library I have built into the existing Winamp player. This will still increase the playlist size and variety of music you can enjoy. One of the pros in iTunes is it’s enhanced shuffling capability where it is much more intelligent and tries to avoid playing songs by the same artist too frequently or in sequence. I have not completely dropped the idea of using iTunes, but it is shelved for now.

I am in process of recording new station promos and ID’s. I hope to have these added in the next week or so. If you would like to participate, send your (192 kbps+ .MP3) files to xrtfm (at) marinifamily (dot) org and I will review them and add them to the library.

Don’t worry, I am still obsessing over this 2.0 project and I hope you will encourage your friends and co-workers to take a listen soon. All they need is the internet and Winamp to listen!

Thanks for listening to XRT-FM!

-Timmy

Interesting Discovery

As I’ve been listening to the new XRT-FM 2.0 from work I’ve noticed some erratic and skipping playback from time to time. I dismissed it as just regular streaming problems. But I began to notice a distinct pattern… Apparently, there is some mechanism within Apple’s DRM protocol that screws up the streaming of their protected songs. I noticed the skipping is only on those songs that I’ve purchased from iTunes. Seems really backwards as I have paid for the song. I own that song now and can use it as I wish. Highway robbery I say.

Of course, there are ways around this and rest assured, Timmy will work through this speed bump. It’s only a matter of burning the song to a CD and ripping it to an MP3 file. No harm, no foul.

Thanks for listening!

-Timmy

XRT-FM 2.0 Beta Project

Update 4/9: I was finally able to get things working! I had to use a LineIn plugin for Winamp and turn Winamp’s volume down. I am still working on getting song title/artist info to populate at least on my website. It would be primo if I could get it to appear in the player too. I will work on this in steps. For now, the music you hear is from the vastly improved library of iTunes. I will keep updating this blog. Please comment as you feel like it!

Update 4/8: I installed iTunes on the station server this morning. I began importing the music into the library and tried a test run. Miserable failure. I tried to use the Soundcard input as was necessary but couldn’t get things equalized as needed. I use a sound leveling plug-in with Winamp called SoundSolution that applies sound management to the stream to make it sound professional and punchy. So far I am unhappy with the results I’ve had. I will keep trying and if you see XRT-FM 2.0 (Beta) on your player, understand that we are testing different things out and we appreciate your input and patience.

Folks, I am very excited about an upcoming demo of what I am currently calling XRT-FM 2.0. Yeah, I know it’s geeky, I will put more thought into that later. For a long time, we’ve been using just Winamp player and ShoutCast to broadcast the station to the World. This has been mostly excellent. In more recent months, since owning an iPod, I’ve gotten more and more familiar with Apple’s iTunes. In iTunes, there is far more flexibility in music programming and scheduling. And it still fits in with my budget of free-fifty-free!

Starting this week, the day hasn’t been determined, I will begin running XRT-FM from iTunes.

I know that Winamp has some powerful playlist capabilities but in some personal trials, I’ve found more frustration and it’s not as intuitive. One downfall that I hope can be addressed is that, for the beta test, there will not be any Artist and Title updates. These will also not appear on the XRT-FM website. I hope there is some nifty way to extract that info from iTunes and at the very least, publish that to the website.

How does it benefit you? There will be a much more organized presentation. Instead of a truly random shuffle, we will be able to avoid playing songs from the same performers too close. We can also employ a rating system where we can emphasize songs that should play more often and songs that should only be played very seldom. We will still never play any advertising of any kind. We will be producing more station ID’s and cool little slogans and such.

I am very enthusiastic about this shift in technology. Since we added the 1 terabyte hard drive, we’ve been adding in complete albums, which will help deepen our selection. Plus there have been songs that over the years we’ve had in the library but have somehow lost that will happily return. iTunes is a much more powerful music management tool that can better handle this large amount of music.

If any of you out there can provide any hints or tricks that can help progress this beta test into production, please add your support by commenting or emailing xrtfm at marinifamily dot org. One other note, if for any reason, I find that this new idea is not working for me or for you, I will return back to the standard methods so you have a consistent and enjoyable station to listen to.

Thank you!

-Timmy

XRT-FM Station Update

Yes, it’s been awhile… Sorry!

As you may have read on the homepage, we have just installed a new 1 TERABYTE hard drive on our station’s music server. This will allow us so much more room to grow and expand. We will be able to really fill-out our already enormous music library! I’m very excited about the potential this provides. We are constantly tweaking the station and how it runs and sounds to make sure it is your favorite place in the World for hit music!

I will return in a few days to bring you all up to speed on things as I get to work on filling up that mammoth of a drive! Thanks for listening to XRT-FM!

-Timmy

What’s a BHB??

Hey kiddies! It’s the day before Halloween! All Hallow’s Eve Eve! So, what is a BHB? Let me tell you! Each year on Halloween, we at XRT-FM pool our best scary and silly songs and ghost stories and make a day out of it. This is the 2007 edition of the Big Halloween Broadcast!

Some of the regular features include the scary songs and music and sound effects. We also are putting together station announcements from you guys wishing the listeners a Happy Halloween. We will then play the original broadcast of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre production of The War of the Worlds from 1938. That will happen at 8:00pm (mountain time) and repeated at 10pm.

I’m pretty excited to see how this year’s edition goes and hope you all enjoy it as well. Please submit ideas, song suggestions and any feedback here as a Comment.

Find out more and how to listen here: XRT-FM

-Timmy