October 13, 2006

radio free #mofirc : an Internet radio station by and for the members of #mofirc and Monkeyfilter.

Inspired by Radio Metachat and the Online CDX, the denizens of #mofirc have gotten together and started an online radio station. Why? Because we love you (natch), but also because we love music and we like to hear what other people have to share. Ooh, ooh, can I listen? Of course! All you need is a broadband connection (minimum 128 kbps, or 16 kB/s) and a program that can listen to an MP3 stream — iTunes, Windows Media Player, Realplayer, and XMMS all work nicely. Just go to the station page and click "Tune In." If you don't want to use the embedded player, click one of the icons under "Launch External Player"; if it doesn't open automatically, open the resulting .pls file with the player of your choice. If you have a favorite DJ that you want to stalk, you can have a look at our broadcast schedule (or, even better, subscribe to it and get a prettier weekly view). Groovy, man. So what do you want from me? Absolutely nothing. Well, maybe nice compliments. And a cookie every once in a while. So can I DJ? I have some nice choons. Sure! You'll probably have to install some software that enables you to broadcast; see the radio page for instructions. When you're ready, or if you want to schedule a slot, just drop into #mofirc and say you're interested in broadcasting. This is too good to be true. Is it legal? Yep. We're registered with Loudcity, which allows us to legally play any music we own. Look here (at "DMCA Highlights") for the gory details. Now go listen! :)

  • The current set is themed: I'm playing only songs with names of women in the title. =) Hope you enjoy! I'll be on at least another three hours.
  • such a cool idea! Thanks, monkeys! )))
  • Ahaha, love to whoever wrote the description of me on the DJ page. I had a blast DJing yesterday and plan to take some sets next week. This really is the most fantastic idea ever. Much love to you all for setting it up!
  • Whoa! HOLYYYYY COOOOOWWWWW.
  • Yay! Now listen to the nice music instead of badmouthing the luddites amongst us who can't figger out mofirc.
  • Does this mean *gulp* that the cd exchange is dead??? Fantastic! Can't wait to get home and give a good listen. )))!!
  • Waaay Cool! Thanks, Musical Monkeys!
  • fish tick: Who is badmouthing whom? =( I'm not sure I understand what you mean. We like new people in the 'firc and are always happy to help anyone out that needs assistance visiting our channel... but some people prefer chat (personally, I do) and some prefer message posting. To each his/her own. We've been really excited about this new project and have worked hard on it... we are happy to share with all the Monkeys - whether you IRC or not - who cares? Just enjoy. =)
  • I am a happy, happy Monster indeed. Ta, fellers.
  • I'm so excited about this! Just now I clicked on the links on both the station page and the direct links in the wiki to listen, but I get an error message saying the server isn't responding. But they're playing Tommy Tutone's Jenny! Dang, dang, dang!
  • Mickey, try waiting a minute and then connecting again; the server hiccups every once in a while. Sorry about that!
  • Oh no - was it just a momentary issue? Sometimes the server does this weird "buffering" thing.
  • *doing the reality bites convenience store dance* M-Ma-Ma-Ma-MYYYYYYYYY Sharona!
  • hajen, just a momentary bit of facetiousness, is all!
  • Yay!! You guys rule and all that. ;) See ya in the 'firc!
  • But they're playing Tommy Tutone's Jenny! Hate that song sooooooo much. But love this idea! Kudos to the 'fircs!
  • Okay, I'm back on again for another two-plus hours. Dance music - retro for the first part of the set. Enjoy! =)
  • This is awesome. Why did it take us this long to get a radio station?
  • me on now!
  • *golf clap
  • gomichild brings the rock to your computer
  • I could tell that was gomichild DJing.
  • The hint was the people singing in the funny language?
  • C'est chic!
  • (mostly old) brazilian music for the next 2.5 hours!
  • You people like funny music. Where is Mozart? Where is von Weber? Where is Susac?? /Starts moving feet.
  • I wouldn't mind DJing.
  • You should! Come play!
  • If someone writes better instructions for Windows, I might try DJing too.
  • Does this mean *gulp* that the cd exchange is dead??? The last cd exchange died. It just never happened for some reason. There been no explanation either in the thread or on the forum board dedicated to it. I think spam might be part of the reason for it.
  • (The one that was supposed to happen May 2006.)
  • I'm on now for the next three hours. This set's theme is "songs with titles that are questions". =)
  • Ok, I've added a few more instructions to the Windows section of the wiki, mostly stolen adapted from the plugin's readme file. Hope it helps!
  • Thanks Neddy! I'll give it a go.
  • A great day in MOFI history! Now we just need broadcasters to provide realtime readings of newly added comments... "And then in the daisy_may thread, petebest says 'stick it in quid's pajamas'. Over in the turkmenbashi, bees has a new poem..."
  • If there's a way to speak through this internet radio dealie, you'd better believe you'll be hearing from your good friend koko rose: "Surrender, boys of the internets! You know your wives and girlfriends are all sleeping with the quidnunc kid! And who can blame them? Spending all your time surfing the monkeys and the Fark, and getting your jollies in Halo2! Give up boys, you can't win! Relax to the soothing sounds of koko rose, and forget your troubles! And be sure to send Chy all your money! Good night!"
  • /loses morale
  • Can we speak on this thing? I suppose you'd have to record a track to MP3 format & add it to the tracklist. No live DJing?
  • Koko, if you need any help, come bug us in #mofirc. And make sure you get hte updated shoutcast plugin (not the one that comes with winamp when you dl it).
  • Chryren, I think there's a way to route the broadcast through your soudcard instead of winamp in xp. You might be able to do something that way. A call-in talk show via skype, perhaps?
  • Yes, we need a talk show.
  • Like a frog needs pyjamas.
  • Last night I shot a frog in my pajamas...
  • Remember to tip your DJs.
  • Don't eat lint.
  • And remember to dip your PJ's
  • As for the CDX, I know I never could carve out the time to assemble the songs and then go through the laborious upload process (an hour of my life I'd never see again). This is way easier and I don't get the sneaking suspicion that I'll get hauled off to Federal PMITA prison just for liking music.
  • As long as you're not a part of "Pajamas Media", this radio station sounds cool-ish. I'll sign up for an hour tonight 8PM Pacific, during which I will do the Dr. Demento impersonation I've been working on since my college radio days. Not to be taken internally or seriously...
  • BTW, I previously did a couple spins at MetaChat radio so I got the software and know the rules...
  • We have rules?
  • Well, if it's anything like Fight Club, we've already broken the first two...
  • I thought the only rule was that there were no rules! ...only guidelines enforced with ruthlessly vicious zeal. I kid! /Readies self for the Beating of the Snitch ceremony
  • Yeah, I would like to dedicate "Funky Cold Medina" to Capt, "Who Let The Dogs Out" to Ralph, and I'd like to give a big shout-out to my girl Medusa!
  • I'm totally enjoying this afternoon's offerings. Well done!
  • I think mothninja and Suomynona were DJing around the time of your comment, Lara, in case you want to focus your kudos.
  • We have rules? No, but LoudCity (who hosts the station) is subject to the much-hated DMCA act, and as such has to follow their rules. And the Revolution isn't scheduled to start until after we get the results from the MidTerm elections.
  • And apparently, you can't play the Top 10 Singles from 1978 (when "Saturday Night Fever" was dominating the music biz) without playing 'too many' songs by the same artist or from the same album. A Radio MeCha DJ was sent to Guantanamo for that infraction.
  • ...and I'm sorry I wrote "DMCA act", which is a dumb redundancy like "PIN number" and "ATM machine". But then, I did work for 5 years in the Department of Redundancy Department.
  • How am I supposed to follow this act tonight?
  • I'm fairly certain she wasn't referring to my Select Sunday Selections... but if she was-- Thanks.
  • "...which is a dumb redundancy like "PIN number" and "ATM machine"..." *shakes fist* I believe was Suo's set I was particularly enjoying.
  • After a horrible accident last night involving my old PowerBook and gravity, I went out and bought a MacBook. Internet is now sporadically working at my place (one person at a time; the router is borked), and I've dumped my iTunes library onto the new box from an external hard drive. All this is to say that there will be an 80s hair metal set coming your way in the near future.
  • Thanks Lara glad you liked it
  • Wendell is rocking the Dr Demento vibe quite nicely.
  • mandyman's set of alt-country is pretty stuff.
  • Wow. I've got to start logging in here more often. This is spectacular.
  • I have never been able to get this 'mofirc' thing of which you all speak to work, so I'm sure as hell not going to listen to a radio show full of you all! *sulks*
  • awwww kitfisto.... *pouts*
  • I'm not on #mofirc, but I'll be broadcasting anyway. That is, if pmdboi ever checks his email and gives me the password!
  • Oh that pmdboi...... so not email savvy..... (I think he was asleep and then had to go to school or something)
  • kitfisto there's an easy way to get onto the firc if you have trouble with IRC clients .. this is a webbased solution just type your KITFISTO in the slot at the top then down in the command field type /join #mofirc. Also if my fan is interested there will be another edition of Suo Radio tonight from 11-2 EDT
  • Yay!
  • ...and I'm sorry I wrote "DMCA act", which is a dumb redundancy like "PIN number" and "ATM machine". But then, I did work for 5 years in the Department of Redundancy Department. Well, if you want to examine redundancy, Automated Teller Machine is already redundant. AT should suffice.
  • We've got a thrilling 4 hours coming right up! Gomi will bring you two hours of goodness knows what and after that Neddy will have you crooning along. radio free #mofirc: reducing work productivity across Asia through lack of sleep!
  • Bugger we lost Singapore due to technical difficulties. You have me for an extra hour - then Mr Knickerbocker!
  • I don't know if it's just me, but the calendar is blank from Wednesday onwards.
  • tracicle: that's cos we haven't implemented advanced planning. We were planning on having advanced planning, but we haven't got a plan to get the planning committee to plan a committee to discuss the possibility of the idea of advanced planning. So ... we just kinda wing it.
  • *flaps wings*
  • dmn's got it. For now we just fill in the time as it comes. It's a bit of a stretch to fill in all 24 hours with the current set of DJs, but somehow we've managed so far. We do want more DJs, though, so we don't have to stretch so much. :) That said, the schedule currently serves more as a record of past programs (personally, I post my set list as a comment after my slot's done) than planning for the long-term future. But if you want a spot, by all means, take it! Nothing is reserved unless it says so. By the way, the radio free #mofirc wiki page now has clearer instructions regarding the procedure to get you broadcasting once you've got the proper software installed on your computer; look for the section "Broadcast Procedure."
  • Sorry, that link should have been: radio free #mofirc wiki page. sorry
  • I haven't played around with it yet -- does WinAmp allow you to queue up a bunch of songs ahead of time, or do you have to sit there hitting "play" for each song?
  • Yes, in Winamp you can queue up songs in the playlist. Very nice if you want to get up and make a sandwich. The playlist isn't set in stone either; you're free to change the playlist while it's playing.
  • *stops splicing his reel to reel tapes* oh..
  • Four hours of Canadian content going on now... so much Canadian content that I haven't repeated an artist at all in this playlist. =)
  • Eh?
  • Ahahahaaa oh my god I'm so funny. Sorry. Sugar.
  • You mean "sowr-rey".
  • "soary"
  • You type funny.
  • N'Zealand hosting chic is gettin' a bit feisty, eh?
  • It's mostly hoase music.
  • Fush 'n chups.
  • Is Chy going to DJ soon?
  • *grumbles about lousy internet connection* Sorry, I'm gonna have to put DJing on hold till I figure out how I can get the stuff up without it acting like Skippy the Kangaroo on uppers in a strobe-lighted room. And get some decent music....
  • Alnedra, you and me both. I think I'm going to bitch to our internets provider because my connection is utter crud. Broadband my ass.
  • The ISPs tend to offer good download but they seriously gimp uploads. They also tend to block a great deal of ports, but most people don't mind this because they never use those ports. If users do uploads it is a picture to Flickr which is not really an issue. What sucks is that it is not that the capability isn't there. They intentionally throttle the upload speeds.
  • MonkeyFilter: like Skippy the Kangaroo on uppers in a strobe-lighted room ONETWOTHREEFOUR!
  • Coming up at 6PM EDT, 3PM PDT, 27:15 New Zealand time (I KEED), WendellWadio pwesents: KROQ of the 80s, Part One... In the 1980's Los Angeles radio station KROQ truly was something new and novel. Built from the ashes of a station in the hyper-competitive '70s Top 40 battles that ran out of money and turned off its transmitter, it started out running on the thinnest of shoestring budgets and the knowledge that if it tried to be special and failed, no one would notice or care, but if it succeeded, maybe it would change the face of radio! Or maybe not. Thinking ahead, the station started using "ROQ of the '80s" as a slogan in 1977. Under the singleminded and mostly unsupervised vision of Program Director Ric Carroll, KROQ evolved (or considering DEVO was an early playlist staple, devolved) into a unique musical format. Strangely, during these halcyon years, the groundbreaking punk rock bands of L.A. at the time were only played during the Sunday Night show of local icon Rodney Bingenheimer. Instead, KROQ became dominated by mostly British New Wave acts like Tears For Fears, The Cure and Duran Duran, along with regional breakouts from other regions (like REM and the B52s from Athens, GA) and lots of stuff that was just weird or outrageous. It was said that the easiest way a new band could get a song on KROQ's playlist was to have the word "Sex" in the title. KROQ helped break a lot of acts in the U.S. that couldn't get radio airplay anywhere else. A lot of them were "one hit wonders". And then there were the bands like Blancmange and Felony that nobody else ever wanted to play. By 1984, many of the non-musical elements of the format had fallen into the hands of a rather motley group of radio pranksters, briefly including Wendell Wittler, then known by a different name. How I got in is a long and silly story... how I ended up kicked out even more so. But this is about the music. When I thought to do a KROQ tribute, I thought I'd have enough in my collection to fill an hour or two, but when I threw it all together, I had nearly 110 different artists, filling over 7 hours with one song each. (And there are still a few of KROQ's "identity" acts that I didn't have.) Where available, I picked songs that were played more on KROQ than anywhere else. In the absence of any other logical way to program this pile of 1980s flashbacks, I placed them in alphabetical order by song title. I guarantee that every song played during this series was part of the KROQ playlist for long enough for DJ Jed the Fish to find multiple ways to intentionally mispronounce the band name or song title. The evolution of KROQ after 1990 when the British New Wave was slowly replaced by the Seattle Grunge is another story altogether. Future WendellWadio themes will include: Entertainingly Pretentious Progressive Rock from the '70s (probably another eight hours but with a lot fewer songs) Songs About the Radio (only a couple hours, I promise) The 7-or-8 Best "Stairway to Heaven" Covers Ever (featuring Rolf Harris and Dolly Parton) All Hits, All Formats, No Words With the Playing of Everybody Else's Familiar Theme... The Greatest Stories Ever Sung Novelty Records That Topped the Charts in the '60s & '70s (or came close) and an occasional Demento-Clone Mix
  • What, no "Songs with 'sex' in the title?"
  • Dayyyymn, Wendell. Bravo. Seriously.
  • How I got in is a long and silly story... how I ended up kicked out even more so. Dish! dish!
  • Sorry for the technological difficulties earlier. My winamp decided go nuts.
  • Another four hours of Canadian content; no repeat artists from the last four hours, no repeats in this list either... going on right now.
  • It's gonna be Shonan Party Time with gomi from (GMT+9) 9pm til midnight tonight! (8-11am EDT - start your Friday partying early!)
  • Don't forget... the last two hours of my absurdly long "KROQ of the 80s" tribute will be on today (Friday) at 6PM Eastern / 3PM Pacific / Next Year Tazmanian Time. And I've reserved some Sunday evening time for my "Ripping Off Dr. Demento Show"... (I've also put together a 3-hour playlist of "Pretentious Rock" for early next week - as they say in the radio, stay tuned!)
  • Somebody play something from The Well-Tempered Urinal today! Or Mellow Yellow?
  • Somwthing by Loo Rawls?
  • Depeche Commode? /dead_milkmen
  • It's up on MetaFilter Projects! GO VOTE NOW!!!!
  • bugger VOTE VOTE VOTE
  • And often, if anyone has a sock puppets and few scruples. :D
  • Yes? Oh! Right!
  • You know how I've been complaining about the internet lately? Well, MefiProjects doesn't think I'm logged in. :|
  • Started two hours of '80s groovin' about 20 minutes ago. Awwww yeah.
  • And now, two hours of silliness and comedy bits to celebrate two weeks of radio free #mofirc!
  • Basalisk is playing a couple of hours of tunes now - then I'm on for an hour with Japanese rock - then mandyman!
  • I love this radio station! For some reason I can't listen at work but after a sleepless night with a sick baby, I tuned in at home and it works just fine. I can't tell who's DJing right now - but it sounds like old Brazilian tunes, so I'm guessing it's mandyman. What a great show! I really need a martini to go with this music.
  • Feel better soon, tiny Helenmunkee!
  • Mickey, I'm glad you liked the tunes! I tend to cover late nights (for North America, that is) when our audience dwindles to 1 or 2, so it's nice to know someone enjoyed it :)
  • Hey, we love the response we've gotten so far. We still need DJs, though! If you want to play something, please let us know, either by dropping into #mofirc or sending me an email at cwillmor (at) gmail (dot) com, and we'll get you all set up.
  • Hey you got gomi to rock along with right now! This radio lark is fun! Come and play!
  • During the drought, here are some rather cool free MP3s - "Mercedes Benz Mixed Tape 15". Might hafta disable popup blocker.
  • shoot. This thread is the one I meant. Take 2! *clap* Ruh roh?
  • We're sort-of on air again! A bit intermittent, but still. Currently playing two hours of earworms for you listening pleasure! Wheee! If you want to come DJ (you do, don't you? you know you do!) drop by #mofirc, or email pmdboi, as per the info a couple of comments above...
  • Hoorah for the Muscial Monkeys! In related net-radio thingamajiggers, I've been listeing to Tango Radio all day. It's making the morning fly by.
  • Rub it in. Some of us are not allowed to access any kind of streaming media at work and must listen to 4 or 5 hours at a time of David Gray on the Muzak system.
  • Now playing ROCK! \m/ \m/ (sorry Lara)
  • DJmiddleclasstool is in da house! *rocks out*
  • Ahh, I thought it was off-the-air for good. I may have to stop by and do another set in the very near future! *ponders the theme for my 'cast*
  • whole thing froze my ffox.
  • I totally pwned them with my madd mixin' skillz0rz. I was on the one, and then you know what? I was on the two.
  • Er, word, or something.
  • did you go to eleven? I'll do a set in November! Promise! I still have the jingle I created when I promised I'd do one before.
  • Dude, he went to, like, more than eleven. He went to, like, thirteen or something. You have a jingle?? Share! Share! *is to impatient to wait till November*
  • "Oh, he's a boy that's really mute, He plays songs with drums and flutes, Vo-de-o-de-o-de-o, You're list'nin' to The Muteboy Show!"
  • I just put that John Cage one on repeat. Maybe I can dig the jingle out before then. Otherwise Nov it will be cos I'm in LA all October. See what you started mothninja?