13 July 2011

Requirement for Internet Radio Station






In principle, radio online is not far different from the commercial radio station. They are both using more or less the same technique or procedures. To some extent, the equipment used is almost the same. The only thing that keeps them apart is the size of the equipment used i.e. commercial radio station have more than one on-air studio, several production/editing suite, recording studio and ingest suite.

Unlike commercial radio, online radio usually requires one on-air studio only. This is because, one person can runs the online radio without much hassle as compare to commercial radio where they normally hire few personnel to look after the engineering as well as the programme  side. 
In other words, online radio is much simpler to manage (less man-power, lower operating cost and so on). All you need is as follows:
  • Studio equipment such as broadcast mixing console – usually 4 or 8 channel analogue with USB connectivity is sufficient. 
  • One or two studio microphone (dynamic will do fine, condenser is preferred).
  • Low impedance Headphones (usually 50 ohms).
  • Microphone’s stand (adjustable boom-arm type).
  •  Microphone cables and few audio cable for interfacing, PC desktop with USB, preferably  large hard-disk capacity for audio storage, more than 400GB is better ( in MP3 or others audio format) and audio card.
  • Winamp  (free to download) for streaming audio.
  • Audio broadcast automation software and your creativity.  
  • Broad band subscription (one year minimum)
  • Domain name registration ( name of your radio station e.g. samsonRadio.com or DoggieRadio.com)
  • Last but not least, shoutcast server hosting. 

    Click here for a wide selection of broadcast equipment
    at great prices. 

    Search Amazon.com for broadcasting 
  • Assuming you don’t want to run your own shoutcast server ( running your own server usually limits the number of listeners unless you have a very large fix or dedicated business broadband in the region of 10Mb or more) which is very tedious and can be expensive. My advice is better to rent or subscribe server hosting. Believe me, I have been there before, I know what I am talking about.
 Again, if you find it very troublesome to follow and execute the procedures, do not be despair, call us and let us guide you.