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Removing Ads from a Live Audio Stream in Unix?

Posted by Cliff on from the who-wants-to-listen-to-radio-ads-anyways dept.

Soothh writes "A local radio station here is finally doing streaming audio again on the net so i can listen at work. The catch, they go through Hiwire, which only supports Windows Media Player. Their tech page says that this technology has 'proven difficult to implement on the Unix platform.' Is there any validity to the claim that WMP is the only cost effective way to remove commercials. Anyone know other ways to get streams from real radio stations on a *nix platform?"

6 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Here's the relevant text by PD · · Score: 4, Informative
    Copied it straight out of the link. This might help with those who didn't read the article.
    7. Why don't you support Linux/Unix/Solaris? (Unix)
    Supporting Unix is more complex than simply offering a Windows Media Player for Unix. There was a ruling in favor of AFTRA, the actor's union, which states that commercials made for radio cannot be re-broadcast onto the Internet without payment of huge royalties. Therefore, if you want to stream your radio station on the Internet you need to remove the commercials. Our software enables us to automate the process of removing radio commercials and replacing them with Internet safe ads on Windows platforms. This technology has proven difficult to implement on the Unix platform. At this point we have no plans for supporting the Unix platform.

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    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
    1. Re:Here's the relevant text by Cyberdyne · · Score: 2, Insightful
      This technology has proven difficult to implement on the Unix platform. At this point we have no plans for supporting the Unix platform.

      Uhh... this is server-side technology, unless they're doing something very dumb (like streaming the raw audio, ads and all, along with a replacement set of ads to be inserted instead?!). All they need to do is send the same audio stream they send to WMP clients, but encoding in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, RealAudio or whatever. Hell, you could even do it by piping the Line Out from a Windows client into a Real/Darwin/whatever streaming server for rebroadcast!

      I don't know what the problem really is, but this "explanation" certainly doesn't hold water - either they're talking BS, or the PHBs have taken over the asylum and fallen for some really dumb FUD!

  2. The hiwire streaming how-to (works for me) by PhaseBurn · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've been doing this for several months now, it does work, but it takes some doing...

    Start off with the streaming URL that your radio station offers... You'll want to open this in wget, and download the data inside. You'll have a 2nd stream inside this file, and some other info as well... The stream is what we're most concerned with... Download that stream with ASFRecorder. Link here. This will take up some disk space so don't leave it going when you're not listening (I usually let it write for 8 to 9 hours a day, and it fills up 100 megs or so, which I delete at the end of the day). Now, you can use the AVI plugin for XMMS to play this file on your computer. Link here.

    I hope this helps, if you have any questions, you're more than welcome to e-mail me at phaseburn at phaseburn.net and I'll try to help ya out...

    Best reguards

    --
    -PhaseBurn Welcome to Linux country. On quiet nights, you can hear windows reboot.
  3. Low Tech Solution by FattMattP · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not like this is rocket science. Plug sound output of machine with stream from windows media player into input of machine with Shoutcast encoder (or whatever). Distribute your stream to the masses in MP3 from new server. So you'll lose a little quality from the re-encoding. Big deal, few people will probably notice.

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    Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
  4. Why does the player matter? by cpuffer_hammer · · Score: 2

    I would think the adds would be stripped at the sending/server end. The client should not have to do eanything but convert digits to audio. If they are depending to the client to strip the adds then they are sending them out over the internet even if it is not played at the far end.

  5. DIY by Evro · · Score: 2, Interesting

    If you really want to listen you could just setup your own streaming server at home or whatever and plug the radio into the line in jack. Assuming you have an always-on connection, of course. If you set the bitrate low enough you shouldn't have any bandwidth issues, but the sound quality would obviously suffer. But then again that probably won't matter if it's talk radio.

    JWZ had some perl scripts for doing this... http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/icecast/ . It looks like the app doing the actual streaming is Icecast.

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    rooooar