I posted in another thread in General how I'm DJing w. my empeg on a net station. It's a lot of fun and allows me to play whatever music I want to my friends that live far away. The station I'm doing it for, WOTR is currently looking for more DJ's and I thought the group here would be a perfect match. It's a really laid back atmosphere, they let me play whatever I want, whenever I want.

Set up is real easy too. They walk you right through it. All you need is Winamp, a Shoutcast plug-in and a microphone. If anyone is interested, just fill out their online application.

I know we have a lot of music on this BBS and a variety of it at that. They told me they're looking for some new DJ's, so you seemed like a perfect match! Who knows, maybe we could talk Paul Way into doing live shows!

maybe we could talk Paul Way into doing live shows!

Now that would be cool.

I'm afraid my DJing skills aren't quite up to it. I can make D:Ream 'Things can only get better' segue perfectly into Alex Partys' 'Don't Give Me Your Life', but that's about it. Oh and at a push I can make Basket Case by Green Day and a Jungle Brothers song (can't remember which one right now) play in sync and keep them at the same speed.

Well you've got me beat! I just use a Winamp plug-in to auto crossfade my tracks. This is more like radio DJing than club DJing. I just play songs that suit my mood for that night. Taking requests is up to me. You're playing for people sitting at their computers, not people on the dance floor.

One thing I'm digging about it is playing to friends that live to far for me to hang out with thiem in RL. I have a friend in LA that has similar tastes in music, so I play a track here and there for her. Another buddy was online listening and earlier that week he was asking me about some U2 remixes I had. I was able to play a few for him so he could decide if he wanted to buy it or not.

I've gotten a couple of Private Messages regarding this, so I figured I'd reply publicly in case anyone else was curious:

1) No DJing experience is necessary. There are a couple people that have experience in radio, but most have no prior broadcasting backgrounds. All that is needed is a love of music, familarity with Winamp and basic hardware requirements. This is all done for fun, it's a very laid back atmosphere.

2) Hardware requirements are minimal. I'm running my shows off of a notebook that has a P4 1.6 that I simply added a headset microphone to so that I can talk on air. Software configuartions and setup instructions are sent to DJ's when they schedule an audition. It's just Winamp and a Shoutcast plug-in. I stream from my empeg to my notebook then upto the Shoutcast server, but that's just because I think it's neat. You can play files locally.

3) Auditioning only takes 30 minutes and happens whenever you and the station manager can find the time to do it. All you really need to do is show that your internet connection can handle a healthy upload stream, you can queue songs into Winamp and transition between mic and mp3. My audition was so fun I stayed on the audition server for nearly 3 hours joking around and playing songs for the two station owners.

4) Format. The format simply is FUN as they say. You can jump from rock to opera if you'd like. Listeners will probably be IMing you requests but even the station managers say play what you want and ignore anyone if they don't like what you're playing. I love being able to play songs for my friends that I grew up with that have since moved far away and other friends I've met online. Certain laws are in effect that don't allow you to queue whole albums etc, but they're easy to live with.

5) Timeslots. If you view the broadcast schedule you can see the available time slots. If a slot is already taken, request it anyway. I have the feeling that some people may soon be moving around a bit anyway so it can't hurt to ask. All slots that are currently marked "Available" are taken care of by a bot called "Otto" that plays preset playlists set by the station manager. As a DJ, if you ever see "Otto" online, you're free to log in and take over the feed! I've already done this twice when I was chatting with some friends about music and said to myself "Why don't I just it for them on the station?" I logged in for 45 min, played what I wanted, then logged off. It's like as a DJ you get the keys to the place!!

6) I get nothing for refering DJ's. In fact, I've only been there just over a week, so I don't have any influence there. But a station with more DJs is a healthier station and that's in my interests. The station is run by a music love and his girlfriend who does the site. He's paying some big bucks to host this thing and I guess the audience isn't what it used to be because Otto is playing more these days instead of a live DJ. I also think it'd be great to have more empeggers in there! We all have similar needs for properly tagged MP3's and quality rips. We also all share a certain technical knowhow (and I'm at the low end here!)

what sort of upstream speed is required?
does the dj serve to all people, or he has one connection to a server and the server gives to everyone?

I would imagine it's a relay configuration. When we did shoutcasting we used to run winamp with the shoutcast plugin and the shoutcast server on the same machine. You don't have to do this but we were already in a building with 3x155 meg connectivity to jaNET. I could quite easily have run the encoder at home on my adsl which would have sent one stream out to the server at uni. That machine then accepted listeners and streamed from there. Very simple.

You just stream to the server like marria said. I have a standard DSL connection, nothing fancy. I was even able to play in There, run Outlook, Trillian and Yahoo! Messanger at the same time w. no issues.

I'll be on tonight from 9pm-midnight EST if anyone wants to check it out.

Requests:

Yahoo IM: wotr_brad
AIM: OldDirtyBrad

I wanted to bump this thread up. We had a few DJ's step down so there are more open slots. Especially during the day here in New York Time. That works out good for people in Europe who want to DJ in the evenings. No experience is needed and setup is real easy. I DJ from my empeg, but everyone else does it from their PC.

Everyone does this for fun, if you have to miss a show here and there because of RL commitments, they are very cool about it and one of the other DJs usually steps in for the shift. Here is a link showing the available slots. I just do a 3 hour show once a week, some people just do 1 hour. Whatever works with you. To see how easy it is to setup Winamp to do this, see this link. The password listed isn't the real one, so don't try to steal our stream!

Let me know if anyone is interested. I don't get any credit or anything if anyone signs up, so you don't have to mention my name. I just know we have a lot of music lovers here (obviously). It's been fun hanging out in #empeg and taking requests too!

Oh, this is free btw, I had someone ask me that.