Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

I’m constantly listening to music in my office. I almost never close iTunes unless I’m rebooting because of an update or if I’m working on something that requires audio editing, like if I’m in FInal Cut.

One of the interesting things (in my opinion) about having my little web site blog thing is sharing my taste, or lack of taste, in music with people. Many of you may not have noticed (as I have limited bandwidth to dedicate to it, I don’t advertise it much) I have a link that lets you Listen to my iTunes. This is a live stream of what iTunes is playing and what I’m listening to, assuming I’m in my office. As of this writing I have 1106 songs which equate to 4.8 days of music and take up 5.67 gigs.

I use an application called Nicecast by Rogue Amoeba which “hijacks” iTunes and broadcasts the audio with the track information much in the same way the Shoutcast DSP does with Winamp. Since I was already very familiar with Shoutcast streaming, and because I didn’t really want a bunch of connections to my G5, I set up a linux server to run Shoutcast Server.

This way I only have one constant connection from my Mac to the linux server and the stream is then relayed from there. For informational purposes, Nicecast can in fact be used as a host as well as a broadcast tool if you wish.

This is great for my purposes but if you wanted to run a more professional station, in my opinion you need scheduling. That’s where iCal comes in.

There’s an excellent AppleScript called iCal Calling iTunes which allows you to schedule iTunes events via iCal. The DJ would create a new calendar called “iTunes” and then schedule events within. All you have to do is put the title of the playlist you wish to play as the event title and place it on the time and date you want.

By the way, I was listening to Under Your Sky by Jazzanova while composing this post.