For those who have radio access..

..How to get it working =).

Installing winamp

First off, you need winamp. I use the last version of winamp 2 (2.95, go to oldversion.com to get it), but 5 works too.

Installing SHOUTcast

Once winamp is installed, now you need some shoutcast tools for your own PC. Shoutcast is the technology behind RMRK radio. There is a shoutcast server running on RMRK's machine, always waiting for a source connection. You're going to be the source connection, and to do so you need the shoutcast source DSP. Go to shoutcast.com and click on download, then on be a D.J. Under where it says "Download the SHOUTcast DSP Plug-In for Winamp 5.x", get the file. Latest version as of this writing is 1.9.0. It says winamp 5.x only, but it will install on and work with winamp 2.x if you're using it.

Now you have it installed, go to your winamp preferences and look under DSP/effect plugins. Pick "Nullsoft SHOUTcast Source DSP" and it should automatically startup with its own window.

Setting up SHOUTcast

Before we connect to RMRK's server, we need to setup our encoder. AAC+ is more efficient, but for compatability (and so people using the flash players can listen) we only use MP3. On the encoder tab, setup Encoder 1 to use the MP3 Encoder.

You should generally leave it on 44.100kHz Stereo, just pick a sensible bitrate. The recommended one is 128 or 160. Higher bitrates mean higher quality radio, obviously, but putting the radio on 320Kbps and then playing your shitty 128kbps metallica mp3s you found on kazaa over it isn't going to do anything except waste bandwidth.

Now go to the output tab, and set it up like this for the connection tab:



The Address must be anything that points to RMRK's server. "vps.slyph.org" is the server's actual hostname so will always work, but putting in rmrk.net or crankeye.com will also work. The server listens on port 8000, and of course supply the server's password.

Next is the yellow pages area:



In the description you must put something RMRK related. You could customise it, so say, "Skanker's gay RMRK radio show " or something. URL is always RMRK.net, ICQ always 0, irc is "irc://irc.rmrk.net/crankeye", and AIM is N/A.

The track title setup like that will automatically update the current track in players and also add the description name equivalent to how your player would see an album name.

Notes:

- Make sure the artist and title tags in your source files are filled out
- Try to play decent quality music. By that, I mean, if you have 320 kbps MP3s of songs, great. Playing from 96kbps files not so good.
- DON'T PLAY AAC OR ESPECIALLY WMA FILES. Even if the file is not protected by DRM, they will NOT play over the radio, the listeners will only hear silence.
- The name of the current song (if any) is shown on RMRK itself. If your song title is 4,000 characters long, try to use sensible ones =)
- Changing any settings in source DSP while it's active will make it drop the connection to the server and reconnect. This will kick all of the listeners off, so leave the DSP settings alone while you're broadcasting.

Locked to stop people replying asking for access