I have been fiddling around with uk radio station metadata. I started my efforts with the radio station i spent my year on placement, Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin Radio). I have to hand it to Absolute Radio, they are deffinitely the frontrunners in terms of online radio streaming. They use icecast audio streaming, and provide on-demand metadata for their three stations. For example, they typically send the station name, station genre, a url and more importantly the currently playing track. This makes building an app for their station a joy, as you can connect to the server over a socket [...]

Well, my idea for my final project has shifted radically since my last musings. I originally was looking into peer to peer radio, however, i was never really comfortable with this idea, firstly as it was potentially beyond my skill and secondly it just didn’t POP enough. In the course of my dissertation research I covered many areas in which Internet culture has influenced the radio listener of today.

A topic that came up which really interested me was the effect of customised music (think last.fm, pandora and personal music players) on music discovery. Once upon a time this would have [...]

I have been modifying and adding new stuff to the MAX/MSP patch that i wrote for my sound project. In trying to implement my narrative project i came across a few stumbling blocks. In spite of some poetry having no rhyming structure, I really wanted to keep some semblance of rhyme for this project as a personal preference. This made life a little complicated, as part of the project was for the user to record in their own bit of a poem. How, when playing poems back, could i ensure that the lines read out where in rhyming couplets? Funnily [...]