More challenges...

Just had a look of what the website looked like back in May 2003. It was something like this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20030501222621/http://www.swissgroove.ch/

There was lots of work to be done, every day, and, besides working for money.

I signed up for another server to provide a stream at lower bitrate so that modem and ISDN users were also able to tune into the station. However, the stream at lower bitrate, also after having it run for a longer period, never proved worth.

The guys at radiostreamer.com did quite a good job, especially when they merged with John Simkiss's company Beannet. The technical support was top-notch, mainly thanks to that man, who always took time to look into any problem that arose and was also a great guy to talk to.

On the other hand, radiostreamer.com was expensive to me as I paid everything myself. So I had to constantly check prices and test servers at other providers.

In July I came across radiostream.de whose servers were hosted at various locations around Germany. The had an offer for 250 slots at 128 kbps in the range of 200.- USD. I contacted them and was immediately set up with a test-server that, unfortunately, turned out to be below the quality I was looking for.

Their support was also very good and they really did everything possible to keep up with their promises. Finally, after a few days, they set up a new server at a different location/datacenter and things improved much.

I also got another good offer from a host in Luxemburg who thought that SwissGroove wouldn't increase their numbers of listeners quickly. It was an offer based on limited bandwidth. After only 3 days, I had about 100 simultanious listeners during daytime and that meant that the bandwidth limit offered with the server would be reached only 2 days later. So I had to cancel the account and disconnect the server in order not to run into a financial disaster.

Things at radiostream.de were very changeable. Some weeks their servers ran like clockwork. On others, things got out of hand. Finally, they moved servers back into a level3 datacenter and the performance was just amazing. Very quickly, all the 250 slots were taken during peak hours and again, I had to look around for another solution.

Besides all the technical difficulties, there had been more challenges to overcome with IFPI Switzerland, the International Federation Of Producers Of Phonograms And Videograms. In order to stream music legally, I had to have a contract with them and pay what they ask for.

When I read their contract, I could hardly believe what was written there. They asked me to offer my stream only to listeners within Switzerland. They would only let me stream using the Real Media format and they asked me to keep records from all the people connecting to the stream, etc. etc.

Besides that, they wanted CHF 5'000.- per year so that I was allowed to make the stream publicly available and to make copies of the CDs for streaming.

I called them many times in order to make them lower the amount they asked for but they never wanted to renegociate it. The only thing they offered me was a payment plan.

It was time to either quit or to put up with the rules, pay and keep going. Though I got myself a hobby I could hardly afford, it was also one difficult to just let go.

I paid the amount IFPI asked for but also kept my own rules concerning the technical and geographical aspects of an online radio station.

Besides, it wasn't just another radio station the internet accommodated already plenty of.

It was, after all, the planet's grooviest webradio!

Streaming music and its challenges

The first days streaming from my home turned out to be pretty tricky since ADSL lines at those times disconnected without warning and on quite regular basis. Moreover, when starting to stream at 128 kbps, the line itself could not be used much for surfing the Net or other heavy down-/uploads. So I decided at once to upgrade my ADSL account to the highest possible within the business sector. I also started to look around for a provider offering shoutcast-server at reasonable prices.

In 2003, bandwidth was costy and many providers charged 4 US Dollars or more per listening slot at 128kbps. I looked at offers in the US as providers in Europe were scares and without much experience within that sector. Providers in Switzerland wouldn't want to offer shoutcast servers as they preferred to sell Real Media & Windows Media Servers at outraging prices.

So I first signed up with Mediacast, Denver, who also ran servers in Chicago and NYC.

As a novice, I didn't know what kind of trouble I would run into when signing up with a provider on the other side of the pond. It wasn't actually the provider itself that turned out to be troublesome - it was the distance between the stream-source and the server.

Tracerts showed hops over 20 POPs and pings were in the 300 ms region which made my stream skipped like hell at 128 kbps. I had to lower the bitrate temporarly and looked desperately for another solution.

After searching for days I came across the provider radiostreamer.com who had their servers located (also) in hamburg. I signed up for 50 slots by paying USD 2.75 per slot. The overall connectivity was okay but quite often the servers went down for various reasons.

So running a webradio like this was kind of a adventure. Anything could happen anytime. The only thing I could really count on at that time was the music automation software I used: OTS JUKE/DJ (AV), the australian built software was rock solid and it hardly ever let me down. It sounded pretty good compared to many other software used at that time having a built in sound dynamic volume processing and an awesome auto mix point detection.

I beefed it up with the DSP OzoneMP by Izotope and the Encoder from Spacialaudio.

The first 3 months I had everything running on a Toshiba Notebook. Then I bought a well equipped PC with loads of RAM so that I had two identical set ups should one of the machines go down. One was used for the actual live-stream, the other (spare) one for ripping CDS, updating the webpage, etc.

All was setup in a 2 bedroom appartment. My girlfriend & I made radio in one room and love in the other, had a small kitchen where we cooked some fine food and an even smaller entree with a round table accommodating 4-5 people. We had all we needed.