Hi Adi,

Thank you for your interest in our Campcaster system for radio playout,
automation and program exchange. I'll try to go through your questions one
by one here.

* It appears that the Live Studio Broadcast supports a microphone input
for the DJ that gets broadcasted on air. Is is possible to also record
the voice simultaneously? Or, should something like Audacity be used to
capture the voice? If so, will running both Audacity and Campcaster at
the same time cause any jitter in the broadcast?

Campcaster Studio is intended to be used through a mic mixer, so that the
output from Studio would be one channel on the mixer, a microphone would
be another, a CD player would be another, and so on. Depending on the
speed of the computer you are working on, it may be possible to
simultaneously record voice on the same computer, but this is not
recommended. It may be easier to buy an inexpensive MP3 player/recorder
and record your voice on that, or possibly to do voice work on a separate
computer if possible.

In theory, running both Audacity and Campcaster is OK if your computer is
fast enough, but again, this is not recommended. Also, please note that
Campcaster does not currently provide voice tracking functionality. One
idea we had, however, was that Audacity could save directly to a
Campcaster storage server, but this has not gone further than the
conceptual phase. We would welcome the help, though.

* What is the recommended hardware platform in terms of CPU and sound
cards? What FM transmitters are recommended? Most FM transmitters appear
to have a very low transmission power, but we would typically like to
achieve a range of 10-15km. Can you please give some recommendations on
amplification circuits?

As a rule, the recommended hardware platform would be a relatively modern
computer with a CPU speed of 1 Ghz or higher (again, the faster the
better) and at least 2 gigabytes of memory. We have had good experience
with SoundBlaster sound cards, but if you can afford a better sound card
such as one made by M-Audio, that is even better. We recommend USB
external sound cards because there are not the same problems with drivers
that sometimes occurs with internal or high-end cards. You can also check
card compatibility by visiting the ALSA project at www.alsa-project.org;
if the card is listed as being compatible there, it should run Campcaster
OK.

FM transmitters are a matter of individual choice. Transmitter power is
one factor in its overall range; another one is the location of the
transmitter, where if it is at the top of a high hill the range is usually
greater than if it is in a canyon. But transmitter power is also governed
by your licensing authorities; your license may limit the amount of
transmitter power. It is _extremely_ important to make sure that your
transmitter is legal, otherwise you and your organization face serious
consequences.

* What is the reason that 3 sound cards are needed if we want to do both
live and scheduled broadcast? Is it done only for ease of use, or is
that fewer sound cards result in the two Campcaster applications
interfering with each other? We would ideally like to keep the cost the
equipment as low as possible, and hence use the least number of sound
cards.

We recommend using 3 sound cards for broadcast - one for Live Mode output
in Campcaster Studio, one for preview in Campcaster Studio (so that you
can listen to one item while another one is playing) and one for scheduled
output. You can use only one sound card with Campcaster, but you will lose
functionality. If you use only one sound card, there is a very good
likelihood that your playout will interfere with each other, i.e. the
scheduled output will play at the same as the live output and possibly
with preview over that. In addition, sound cards are relatively
inexpensive these days - depending on where you are they cost between USD
$5 and $200 depending on the quality. Also, remember that most computers
now ship with at least one sound card, so you could conceivably only need
to buy one other card - again, we recommend USB sound cards.

* Are there any benefits to using an FM PCI card instead of a sound card
+ FM transmitter?

I assume you are talking about an internal FM transmitter card that runs
on a computer's PCI slot. This could be an interesting solution if you are
looking to broadcast to a very limited range or if you have a very good
hilltop location. You will still need a good antenna for the card output.

However, we still recommend a separate FM transmitter; if there is a
problem with the computer, for example, you may still be able to broadcast
from CDs or cassettes while the computer is being serviced. But if the
entire machine is in for service, you'll definitely be off the air.


* Is somebody working on integrating a content management system such as
Drupal with Campcaster? We would ideally like to have a single platform
to access information including both RSS feeds for news updates and
audio files for radio broadcast.

We're very glad you asked that question )) We also make a content
management system called Campsite that provides integration with
Campcaster out of the box. With it you can have RSS feeds for news updates
and audio files for audio on demand through the site, as well as the files
for audio broadcast. You can find out more about Campsite 3.0 at
http://www.campware.org.

With other content management systems you would have to do some
programming to create an interface between the Campcaster storage server
and the content management system. This may either be something you would
be able to do very easily in-house or contract someone out to do. If you
decide to do this, please let us know and we will be happy to provide you
with pointers and technical documentation. By the way, our developers'
page is at http://code.campware.org/projects/campcaster.


* Is somebody working on integrating celliax or some other system with
Campcaster for live interaction with the radio audience through cellular
or landline or Skype dial-in?

We've wanted to have integration with Asterisk in general for quite some
time for the provision of such things as audio on demand. We have limited
resources of our own, but would be delighted to have others continue to
build new functionality on top of Campcaster. That's what open source is
all about


I hope this at least answers some of your questions. We'll be looking
forward to additional questions and ideas.


Best regards,


Douglas Arellanes







=============================================
Media Development Loan Fund
=============================================
Douglas Arellanes
Head of Research and Development
Center for Advanced Media--Prague (CAMP)
Na vinicnich horach 24a/1834, 160 00 Prague 6
Czech Republic
Tel: + 420 2 3333 5356, Fax: +420 2 2431 5419
Mobile: +420 724 073 364
Skype and Yahoo IM: dougiegyro
http://www.campware.org
=============================================
http://www.mdlf.org
=============================================




Aaditeshwar Seth
Sent by: campcaster-support-bounces@netfinity-4.mdlf.org
05/24/2008 12:53 AM
Please respond to Support mailing list for the Campcaster software project


To: campcaster-support@netfinity-4.mdlf.org, Douglas.Arellanes@mdlf.org
cc:
Subject: [campcaster-support] Campcaster in India


Hi,

We are planning to use Campcaster to set up a community-radio station in
India. Some quick questions:

* It appears that the Live Studio Broadcast supports a microphone input
for the DJ that gets broadcasted on air. Is is possible to also record
the voice simultaneously? Or, should something like Audacity be used to
capture the voice? If so, will running both Audacity and Campcaster at
the same time cause any jitter in the broadcast?

* What is the recommended hardware platform in terms of CPU and sound
cards? What FM transmitters are recommended? Most FM transmitters appear
to have a very low transmission power, but we would typically like to
achieve a range of 10-15km. Can you please give some recommendations on
amplification circuits?

* What is the reason that 3 sound cards are needed if we want to do both
live and scheduled broadcast? Is it done only for ease of use, or is
that fewer sound cards result in the two Campcaster applications
interfering with each other? We would ideally like to keep the cost the
equipment as low as possible, and hence use the least number of sound
cards.

* Are there any benefits to using an FM PCI card instead of a sound card
+ FM transmitter?

* Is somebody working on integrating a content management system such as
Drupal with Campcaster? We would ideally like to have a single platform
to access information including both RSS feeds for news updates and
audio files for radio broadcast.

* Is somebody working on integrating celliax or some other system with
Campcaster for live interaction with the radio audience through cellular
or landline or Skype dial-in?

Thanks in advance!

Adi

Thanks Doug and Sava! The information really helps. I think for now I am
going to use the suggested configuration, probably with 2 computers.
I'll run Campcaster on the first computer, and have an external mixer to
also get inputs from sources such as a mic and a phone. Then I plan to
direct the mixer output to an FM transmitter, and also into the
soundcard of the second computer. I think I can then use
Campsite/Darkice on the second computer to archive and stream the broadcast.

I'm planning to use the Via mini ETX boxes because of their low power
consumption. What do you think?

What would suggest for a good 25-50W FM transmitter?

In the future, this is what I really want to do -- have all the mixing
done in software itself, from sources including a live mic, Campcaster
studio, and a cellphone interfaced through celliax. Then, if I use a PCI
or USB FM transmitter card, I can eliminate the need for a $500 FM
transmitter, and only have a cheap handmade RF amplifier to get a good
FM output. I think I might run into OS scheduler issues to do mixing in
software, but hopefully they'll be solvable.

And I'll definitely contribute to the code.

regards
Adi