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... From time to time, we've been reporting on the progress of Rain's crack team of interns on their "class project" -- in the interest of journalism and gaining insight into the industry -- to build their own Internet-only radio station. For background purposes, you may want to read Part 1 of this story (here), and Part 2 (here). ...

BY PAUL MALONEY WITH RAPLH SLEDGE
Step #3: Preparing the audio for streaming
In our last two installments of this series, you may remember, the RAIN crack team of interns: 1.) decided that the RAINRadio station would feature a format of Classic Pop Standards, and 2.) put together a playlist of the biggest and most recognizable hits of that genre. So, armed with RAIN top management's vast cd collection comprised of the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and James Darren's "Vic Fontaine" character from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine," the team attacked their next task: converting the music into a form that can be streamed over the Internet.

The first step of the procedure is a process known as "ripping," or in slightly less violent terms, "extracting." Basically, a selected compact disc is placed in the CD-ROM drawer. Some of the basic information from the disc (track numbers and length) is automatically read by one of two extraction software applications used by the team: Poikosoft's Easy CD-DA Extractor, and CDex, a freeware program authored by a gentleman named Albert Faber.

What happened next shocked and amazed Rain's crack team of interns (well, at least one of us thought it was pretty cool). You see, nearly every CD one might want to pop into the extractor has a heap of what is called meta-data attached to it. If you happen to know HTML, you might know that "meta tags" are used to block off information that the end-user isn't necessarily going to see, but is nonetheless helpful in identifying and describing the site to search engines and the like.

Likewise, aside from the great music that's on all your cds at home, there resides identification codes. These codes are associated with information about the music (artist name, album title, and song titles) stored at the Compact Disc Data Base, or CDDB (now known as Gracenote). Simply plunk the disc into the machine, hit the button on a CDDB-enabled extractor like one of the ones we used, and BAM! -- album, artist, and song titles appear! To heck with typing it all out by hand!

Actually, since the team knew there would be a pretty significant amount of material to extract and encode for streaming, and that all the artist names and titles would have to be put into a database which would be accessed by the player program (more on that in a later installment), there would have to be a more efficient way to organize all this information. It was at this stage that the artist/title/album information was converted into legal directory and filenames.

With the songs given the proper filenames, they were now ready to become, well, files. As "crack" as the crack team of interns is, we weren't able to come to an agreement on the origin of the term "ripping." Perhaps some folks visualize the transfer of digital information from the CD to a computer's hard disk occurring at such a rate of speed as to be described as such. Or, since this process is the first step on the road to hell (i.e. converting music for -- gasp! -- file-sharing purposes), the term stems from the phrase "ripping off."

Nonetheless, a click of the mouse and we were off, ripping the pure digital happiness from the shiny silver disc, and recording it onto the hard drive as a .WAV file. Each track took about 45 seconds to rip. Our songs were now ready for the "encoding" process. (CONTINUED BELOW)

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(CONTINUED FROM ABOVE)
.Wav files are huge -- really big. As in 30 or 40 Mb. In other words, much too large to even want to have in a collection, much less to stream to a potential Internet radio listener. So they had to be compressed (made into a file, that while not "playable" without being "decompressed" by the player on the user's end, is much smaller) into a file that could be streamed by our server.

Stepping back for a moment to our decision on streaming technology. RAIN top management and the crack team of interns, after some deliberation, had previously decided to stream using WindowsMedia technology -- at least to begin with. We had access to documentation on implementing the software, our streaming provider was already equipped for WindowsMedia delivery, and the IT member of our team had had some experience working with the technology.

That's not to say, later in the experimentation process, that we wouldn't be adding to our array of streaming options with one or more of the other fine products out there, like RealAudio, Emblaze, or even streaming-MP3.

One file type that WindowsMedia streams, and that would suit our purposes, has the extension .WMA. The process of converting .WAV files to .WMA file types is known as "encoding."

Of course, we're still a few steps away from having a radio station. A player has to be built, and the database filled with the song information has to be assembled. These topics will be addressed in the next part of this series. However, the RAIN crack team of interns is so proud of the design we've decided the player will have, we couldn't help but give RAIN readers a sneak peek.

To be continued...

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BY PAUL MALONEY
Multi-channel Cyberradio2000 has teamed with Lightningcast and joined the somewhat exclusive ranks of Internet-only webcasters serving audio ads.

Cyberradio2000 General Manager and Vice President Lee Michaels told RAIN, "Lightningcast's technology works and that's the bottom line. It serves as a guarantee to the advertiser that their ads were heard by people most likely to have a need for their message or product. As webcasters we have the ability to deliver the buyer's clients to listeners that match the demographic of the product. (Traditional) radio can't do that as effectively as we can."

Michaels' partner Sal Lepore says that with the Lightningcast partnership, the company can be "deadly accurate in our numbers." He cited this as a necessity to overcome the widely-reported reluctance on the part of media buyers to spend money at Internet content sites, like Internet radio. Lepore says, "With the high quality and quantity of our numbers we offer the missing link."

According to the company, the Chicago-based Cyberradio2000 has over two million listeners tuning in to its 65 channels of music each month.

Alexandria, VA-based Lightningcast also counts Morfeo and DiscJockey.com as partners. The insertion company works with audio and video, and is handles both the WindowsMedia and RealAudio formats.



Here's feedback regarding the newly-released Arbitron Webcast Ratings results, and Rain's analysis of the numbers (here)...

"Reporting the number of listeners to their streams would be detrimental..."

(From RAIN:) "...Arbitron is only measuring in the neighborhood of 900 streams. That leaves out thousands and thousands of others -- like Spinner, Sonicnet, Cyberradio2000, and WWW.com. Of course, other webcasters might be having similar results as those rated by Arbitron, but who knows?"

That's probably the case. We can assume a couple of things: 1) Arbitron and Measurecast have solicited their involvement 2) If they (Spinner, CyberRadio2000. www.com, etc.) thought that audience quantification would help them generate revenue, they'd participate.

The non-participating webcasters obviously sense that reporting the number of listeners to their streams would be detrimental to them and the likely reason for that is that their numbers are low. After all, they know how many stream requests they get, whether they chose to report them or not.

In radio, it's easier to sell no ratings than low ratings and that's probably true for webcasting too. When some webcaster's audience grows large enough that publishing the numbers will add revenue, you can bet they'll do it.

-- Bob Bellin

"Analysis is right on the money..."

Your analysis is right on the money. It's close to OUTRAGEOUS that hardly anyone (you are a great exception) is calling Arbitron on the selectivity of the streams it measures. Only 900! Yet they are quoted everywhere.

In a way, it's the same as the way they rate radio. Stations with a 2 share REALLY have ratings that MIGHT be between a 1.3 and 2.7 66% of the time and could be anywhere else the other 33%.

-- John

"Kids getting back to their schools (equipped with T-1s)..."

The big monthly increase could partially be from all those college kids getting back to their schools (equipped with T-1s). Look for another increase in September.

-- Bill Fleming, Principal William Fleming & Associates Specialized Investment Banking

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November 5-7	NAB European Radio Conference, Berlin
November 12-14	Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) "Broadcasting 2000: On-air / On-line," Calgary
Nov. 28-Dec. 1	Radio Ink Internet Conference, Santa Clara, CA, featuring a brand-new national study on Internet radio usage presented by Eric Rhoads & Kurt Hanson
February 1-4, 2001	RAB 2001. Details coming soon.