Basic Radio Console - a simple player console that's free to use
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Oliver Needham posted on Sunday 16th June at 23:37Over the past couple of years, I’ve been the technical manager for student radio station, One Media Radio and community station Cre8 Radio.
I’ve tried to develop their online streaming players so they are as versatile as possible, whilst working similarly on many platforms.
I stumbled across MediaElement.js several years ago and used it for small projects, but then found it could handle audio streams, so I built it into some radio consoles.
Today I’ve launched “Basic Radio Console”: http://oliverneedham.co.uk/basicradioconsole, which is a simple player that’s easily customisable and works on lots of platforms.
It’s free to use, under Creative Commons, and hopefully I’ll be able to develop it with feedback from users and stations.
If you’ve got a station that needs a new or better player, have a look and pass it on to whoever it may concern. Hopefully the users of MediaUK will have some feedback for me.
Thanks Glyn!
Things like the volume slider changes when you go between desktop and mobile device. It tries to use the native controls of the device for sound. But this is a setting that can be changed within the MediaElement.js code.
As for links to other things, you could use the slides to do so. They’ve upgraded the Cycle plugin and I haven’t quite figured it out yet so you can have linked images as well.
At the moment the plan is to keep it free. I can’t currently justify getting people to pay for it, plus I’m not sure the licences of the other plugins allow it to be ‘sold’. It’s something I could look into for the future.
The width issue on mobiles is something I’ve found before and am trying to look at :)
I recorded my VOs with my phone, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s not fantastic! I’ve got access to a proper studio today so I’ll re-record the links.
Thank you for your feedback so far! :)
VO was surprisingly good for a phone! Not good enough for production work, but certainly good enough for ENG/remote work. What phone was it?
The HTC One, using the app Tape-a-Talk Pro. There is a bit of processing on the speech as it was quiet whilst I tried to avoid popping!
Nice idea. Not sure the play element is quite as pretty as Radioplayer’s, but it’s a nice start and something I’m sure a lot of stations will find useful.
Hi Oliver,
Why Creative Commons in particular, rather than the GPL or another open-source licence?
James: It definitely could be ‘prettified’!
Andy: I don’t really know much about the other licences. I wouldn’t call this project open-source either. It’s simply free for others to use and redistribute in it’s original form. That’s the principle I was going for. If it’s not quite right, it’s still early days and can easily change :)
The Creative Commons licence doesn’t allow anyone to modify the code (no derivatives) which means it’s a little pointless. You might consider examining licences a little more – the good folks at RadioDNS might help here.
The ‘cycle’ code wouldn’t be so good if thousands of people were listening: it appears to poll something once every second or so. The way the Virgin Radio “now-playing” code worked was that it polled every ten seconds or so, and when a new song started, it didn’t bother updating at all until 2-minutes 10 seconds: since songs are rarely shorter. You might consider something similar.
I’ll give them an email then. The way I read it is that they can use it, modify it but not redistribute the modified version. I could be wrong!
The way the ‘on air content’ is updated definitely needs another look at. Most of this is just stuff that I’ve pulled together that worked for me, and I understand it might not be suitable for larger organisations.
I will dive into the code of Cycle2 to see if there’s a way to reduce the amount of polling time.
Thanks for your suggestions James, they really are appreciated! :)
I like it, although it would be nice if it could play aacPlus Icecast streams. (using the Icecast KH branch)
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Well done Oliver – a really good idea. Nice simple, yet professional website too. I’m surprised how difficult it is to get streaming audio on many station’s websites. Some “just work”, but many just download a .pls file that you have to see and click on, and others have me stumped and I never manage to get any audio!
It seems to have most things you’d want in addition to audio. eg: now playing info, social networking, space for adverts etc). Suggested additional features: Volume slider/knob, email the studio, buttons to link to parts of the website (eg: Schedule, About, News etc)
Do you plan to develop and sell this eventually? Or will it stay free?
A little bit of otehr feedback:
On my Android it displays slightly too large – say 110% of screen width
Voiceover – your voice sounds strangely telephonic compared to the full bandwidth music. Maybe a better mic, or less mic processing needed? Personally I’d not have so large gaps between sentences either – but now I’m quibbling!
A great job.