WREK to air multimedia event featuring spoken word audio synced with text displayed on your radio receiver
Starting on Sunday night, December 18th and continuing until Wednesday night, December 21st, WREK will be airing an audio series that will simultaneously display related text on your radio receiver or internet streaming player. The events will air at midnight sharp each night and represents a collaboration between local artist Joey Orr and former WREK chief engineer Chris Campbell. Please see our press release and tune in at midnight for this special “live” event!
If you do get this to work on your FM radio receiver, we’d like to hear about it. Were you seeing just 8 letters at a time, cycling past? Or were you seeing longer strings of text, changing every 15-20 seconds?
Some smartphones (e.g. iPhone, Android) have FM radios built into them, and those should support this RDS capability. If you listened on your smartphone, we’d love to hear from you about it. Contact information is below.
If listening online, you’ll want to use this link, and get it to load into your separate streaming application (not in your web browser itself).
- You should not use any of the various flash listening methods that are embedded on the WREK website, because they will definitely not display the text stream.
- We know that Apple’s iTunes software works well for this — it displays the text information at the bottom of the screen when listening via the link above. If your iTunes gets stuck saying “Getting Playlist”, try listening to another radio station, then come back to WREK; that’s seems to clear it out.
- Windows Media Player does not display the text. Please let us know (via the email address below) if you do get it to work.
- WinAmp may or may not work. Please let us know (via the email address below) if you do get it to work.
A couple of articles were written about the event:
- Creative Loafing http://clatl.com/
culturesurfing/archives/2011/ 12/21/midnight-bill-concludes- tonight-on-wrek - RadioWorld (radio industry magazine) http://radioworld.com/article/
wrek-beefs-up-rds-hd-text- display-for-special-program/ 154966 - RadioWorld follow-up, after the event: http://www.radioworld.com/article/wrek-reports-back-on-custom-rds-project/211157
- Broadcast Electronics gave us a “high five” for the unusual use of our AudioVault system
Here are URLs for downloading an mp3 copy of each event. These links will start expiring Sunday, January 1st, so don’t delay if you want them.
- http://archive.wrek.org/main/
128kb/Mon0000_old.mp3 - http://archive.wrek.org/main/
128kb/Tue0000_old.mp3 - http://archive.wrek.org/main/
128kb/Wed0000_old.mp3 - http://archive.wrek.org/main/
128kb/Thu0000_old.mp3
However, note that these mp3 files do not have the “subtext”! The simultaneous transmission of the text, the central feature of this event, was strictly a “live” event and could not be captured by the archive. We did capture the event on video, literally videotaping a radio receiver, and hope to have those videos up for viewing in January.
Joey Orr, the collaborating artist on this event, has a website about the archival material used in this event. http://alwaysmylove.wordpress.com/
Questions or feedback? Email chris@wrek.org. Thanks!
