radio

Everyone in a particular demographic will now know that the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, has announced a plan to close two of the most Reithian of radio stations, 6Music and the Asian Network. If you're up in arms about these closures, you can still do something about it.

Kate Butler has an excellent eight-point plan. You don't have to complete all eight points: this is not a competition. More specifically, J Hunt has a basic pro forma letter and two email addresses you can send it to. I recommend you actually send it to both, as you won't get a reply from the "srconsultation" one.

In the spirit of not sending anything entirely pro forma, I've written my own as an open letter below (and of course emailed it to the relevant contacts). Feel free to rewrite for your own use.

Subject: Response to Mark Thompson's announcements - NO to closing 6Music and Asian Network

To whom it may concern,

I would like to address proposals announced on March 2 2010 by the BBC director general Mark Thompson. These suggest the closure of BBC 6Music and the BBC Asian Network, among many other changes.

I am a loyal supporter of the BBC and of the licence fee. I believe that the BBC's television, radio and multimedia outlet easily justifies the licence fee, and moreover that the two stations earmarked for closure in the proposals are exactly what the BBC is about and what make the BBC worth its fees.

Each station fulfils a remit that commercial broadcasting simply cannot and will not provide for. The stations cater for "sizeable minorities", which commercial media ignores in favour of massive homogeneities. 6Music's audience are committed, involved, interested listeners who get a lot out of the service, whereas a large commercial station (or even BBC1) simply does not have that audience buy-in. 6Music, the Asian Network and catering for other "sizeable minorities" constitute the most direct routes to the very heart of Reithian, socially active, life-changing public-service broadcasting. 6Music supports live music and niche genres, and provides an access to the BBC's archive of recordings, thus offering a service not just for listeners but also for the UK's arts and culture, for which no equivalent commercial alternative exists.

Having said that, I would certainly not recommend the closure of any other part of the BBC in the place of these stations: I am not writing to you to merely express a preference as to where the axe should fall (although I am myself an avid listener to 6Music.) In an ideal world I would rather there be no axe at all: through ringfenced experimentation and risk-taking the BBC has always fostered new talent and fulfilled social functions that again no commercial broadcaster would care about. Any closure at the BBC makes me, a BBC fan, unhappy.

Yet if cost-cutting is essential, then what's the point in cutting such vital, heartland services for the sake of some £7m and £21m respectively? Such sweeping cuts make for great soundbites, but when BBC1 has a budget of £1400m, and £600m is being brought back into media production by the closure of online services, then it would surely represent far less of a wrench for £30m of savings to come from that £2000m total - around one percent of that total! - rather than getting rid of 100% of the 6Music and the Asian Network channels.

If the BBC can work with its audiences of "sizeable minorities", rather than neglecting them when the time comes for cuts; if the return of £600m into programme-making can be visibly demonstrated to float 6Music, the Asian Network and even other digital channels; if the BBC Trust rejects the proposals to close these passionately loved stations; then it will find that the listeners to these stations will be active and reliable supporters of the BBC for years to come.

I therefore strongly urge the BBC Trust to reject these proposals, for the good of musicians, of the BBC and of the listening public.

Best regards,
J-P Stacey

With any luck I'll be talking to Danny and Lou on BBC Oxford tomorrow at half noon, about the phenomenon that is Oxford Geek Nights. It's all rather good timing in one sense, given that OGN10 is happening tomorrow evening, but terrible timing in another sense, given that I have to get ready for OGN10 happening tomorrow evening.

All of this is subject to change, of course. Producer Mark Watson (not that Mark Watson) has been very obliging in me messing him around with times and locations, agreeing to the phone interview and other shenanigans, but live radio being what it is, and Mark's well of patience being surely only as deep and as full as the next man's....

Still, I'm looking forward to it. When I'm not panicking that they'll ask me something incriminating. All right, I confess! I had two of the free drinks at OGN8!

One of my resolutions this year is to try to cut down on the carbon I spend on music. Notwithstanding my purchase of the In Rainbows discbox, I’ve amassed an awful number of discs of metallized plastic in barely-recyclable containers. (I say “barely” because K. got me a pencil for Christmas made out of old CD boxes, and a pen from dead car parts. But there’s only so many pencils the world can use.)

As I spend the scraps and offcuts of January and February evenings ripping and filing my 2007’s CDs—some of which I won’t listen to very often once they’re fossilized in the collection—I’m aware of a tremendous weight of madeness and invested time and energy on the part of the manufacturers, and of a sort of casual luxuriating in my first-world lifestyle on my own part. You prepare a playlist before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my tapeheads with crude oil; my CD tray overflows. So in 2008 I hope to buy as few CDs as possible (none is the target) while also avoiding DRM-crippled music and staying legal.

To this end I’ve been seeking free and semi-free online music—free as in beer, semi-free as in of limited choice—since the new year. So far, outside of bittorrenting (which is obviously of variable legality, depending on what you’re downloading), I’m having some success with Last.fm. Until recently they offered a sort of customized “radio station”, where your input into the of the next track was limited to an intelligent deduction by Last.fm based on what you told it you enjoyed in the past. Now, alongside this potluck service, they’ve just started offering three free streamings of any explicitly chosen track before requiring you to buy the track from a commercial partner.

I’ve yet to try the former service (I think you might have to subscribe to be on the beta wagon: I’ll look into that later), but the latter has so far provided our house with unlimited, free access to a radio station for our very own target market. While such slightly sinister profiling might make it harder for me to discover truly new music, it does at least permit me to expand the boundaries of my comfort zone slowly, and cast a critical eye over my friends’ music preferences, while at the same time giving artists their due and most importantly avoiding physical recordings unless I really want them.

Most commercial support for Linux distributions still consists of monolithic installations, wrapped up with checksums to prevent you tampering with them, and installing themselves on your computer in whatever location and potentially harmful fashion they fancy. Until upgrading to Gutsy this was largely my experience (painfully and often repeated) with such packages as nVidia and wireless drivers, and interesting software that barely gave a second thought to existing Feisty users.

After a spot of Googling I was expecting to have to go through the same palaver with Last.fm’s client, and crossed my fingers that nothing would go horribly wrong. But I needn’t have worried: the Linux client for Last.fm is

1. free of cost, as in beer
2. free of restrictions, as in open source
3. free of hard work, as in a no-sweat installation utilizing the Debian packages and apt package management that’s core to Ubuntu

To install it on Gutsy, you first want to add the GPG key for the repository for security reasons. At a command line, type:

wget -q http://apt.last.fm/last.fm.repo.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

You’ll be asked by sudo for your password. Then, open Synaptic Package Manager (under “System > Administration” in the GNOME menus); then, via “Settings > Repositories”, add the following new third-party repository:

deb http://apt.last.fm/ debian stable

You can then search for the Last.fm widget’s package in the manager (hint: it’s called lastfm) and install it. When you first run it after installation it’ll ask for your Last.fm account, so best have one of those in advance. And that’s it: you’ve now got Last.fm’s widget on your Ubuntu PC.

All of the above is explained briefly on the very URL of the apt repository. Not only that, but they have a free bonus photo of a very cute bunny in case all the apt stuff bores you rigid. Like a TV licence for the Flash version of the BBC iPlayer, all of this is practically worth a subscription alone. As I type, my mouse sits over the very location of the link to do so in a separate tab. I just need to know first: how many more rabbits do I get when I join?

There’s currently no plan to switch off FM stations. In fact, many radio bosses have said oh, for heaven’s sake to the very idea. There is, astonishingly, less of a plan for radio switchover than there is desire among the general public for TV switchover. So that must be some sort of record for nothingness.

Seriously: who among us is just itchy and fidgety, waiting for analogue TV signals to be switched off? Who wakes up of a morning thinking, ooh, Whitehaven have to buy Freeview boxes now! with a frisson of glee? Radio switchover would be even more disastrous, of course: whereas TVs normally have a gap between themselves and an aerial into which to insert a Freeview box and convert digital to analogue, most radios are monolithic: receiver, “decoder” and audio equipment all together. That means that the average of five radios per household would be simply landfill material, useless fizzing boxes capable of picking up nothing but static. Future generations will already find a sliver in the geological strata that they can classify as “analogue to digital”; FM switchoff would add a shiny, plasticky laminate to that layer.

Here’s a thought, though: how about a little digital-to-analogue converter for radio? It could be the size and construction of, say, a Fon, and configurable over USB. It would transmit FM in the style of an iTrip to fill perhaps the room it’s kept in, plus neighbouring rooms. It could transmit multiple FM stations at the same time, and even mimic the frequencies of the analogue stations (if they were ever, say, switched off without anyone wanting them to be: God forbid!)

But what if your converter’s chosen frequencies conflict with next door? FM transmission depends on phase coherence, so even if your two boxes were within an electronic ace of each other frequency-wise, they’d still interfere with each other and cause all sorts of beating, flangeing and other dirtily-named auditory confusion. At least when someone passes you on the motorway and their phat BMW iPod transmitter briefly swamps yours then they’re gone quickly, hopefully to come to some sort of messy grief on the next bend. But if you’re stuck near someone who permanently foxes your radio listening—and it would only take maybe three or four such converters for a conflict to be inevitable in the narrow FM band—then what do you do?

Answer: let the converter boxes know how to talk to each other. Let them negotiate their frequency spreads. Let them, moreover, report back to you over what sort of understandings you and your neighbour’s radios can come to. Let them synchronize, if possible, on stations you both want to listen to, strengthening the signal and meaning both of your houses are entirely covered by the FM cloud. Exploit, don’t squash, the wisdom of the group.

It’s one of the worst-kept tech secrets in the world, but Real Audio streams can be downloaded using software such as mplayer and then converted to MP3 format with lame. Both of these are available in Ubuntu using the non-Ubuntu package manager Automatix. The possibility of doing this conversion implies that, although the BBC offer all their programs in Real Audio and only a few as podcasts, you can in principle put any you like on your portable music device.

Similar solutions abound on the web: Tom Taylor has a method involving mencoder; other methods can be found all over the place. However, these all involve a bit of ad hoc command-line intervention, or scripts which aren’t terribly configurable. There are GUI and proprietary commands, but they tend not to offer great support for command-line and therefore scheduled operation.

I’ve knocked together a Python application called rmrip: it’s available in a tar file from http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/files/code/rmrip.tgz. If you unzip this to a directory you’ll find a number of .py files and a config.conf configuration file. Edit config.conf to match your system requirements and stream preferences, make sure rmrip.py is executable, then run it. mp3s should eventually appear in a subdirectory called YYYYMMDD unless you configure the system otherwise.

The application can in principle be run from a cronjob, so it could tick over late at night when everyone’s internet is otherwise nice and quiet. In addition, conversion works via a named pipe, which is a funky way of piping the intermediary, enormous .wav audio file straight into lame, rather than saving it to disk. This does unfortunately restrict the application to non-Windows machines, but it’s a great help for audiophiles with limited disk space: .ra and .mp3 files can be in the hundreds of megabytes for many-hour programmes, but the associated .wav would take up gigabytes.

Current requirements include (please give any feedback on this!):

• mplayer and lame: their locations are configurable
• The subprocess module in Python

Current file types supported:

• Direct rtsp://….ra Real Audio stream links
• http://….ram references to Real Audio streams
• http://….rpm Real Audio playlists (BBC so far only format tested)

To get you started, dave.org.uk has provided information on how to get stream information using a standalone Python program, and also has potentially out-of-date static pages detailing the current BBC streams.