 This is the first of several sessions on open source media ecosystems, a series of highlights we're doing of open source software that you can use and explore to host media various kinds. We're going to do this a little different today, Amanda. We're going to actually approach this in a very pragmatic, practical writing and English paper type of way. Yeah, two English nerds here, so I think it works for us. That's right. We're going to go through the who, what, when, where, and how ABCs of open media ecosystems application one, which we won't reveal just yet, right? Not just yet. Not just yet. Rather, we're going to start with a key question of who. Who? That's a really good question. The who behind AzuraCast actually is someone by the name of Buster Niece and Buster Niece had a discussion recently, probably maybe not recently, maybe like a year ago with Tim Clark, who's part of the Reclaim Community. And when I was listening to Buster Niece talk about his experience developing this open source software, he talked about having started at a university. He was working, I believe in an IT group, but I'm not sure of that at a university and then spun out to develop this open source platform. Then I guess the next question is going to beg. Yes. So what, what? I don't want to add too many words down to that because the question is what? What? What is AzuraCast? And AzuraCast is, like I said, the first of the open media ecosystem tools, open source media ecosystem tools we'll be looking at. And their tagline is web radio station in a box. I kind of like like the box being server obviously, but this is a self-hosted open source web radio station. And we were joking earlier like web radio is funny because when you talk about web radio, it seems like, you know, very late 90s trying to map existing media systems on top of the new web. And I think there was a joke in that TV show by HBO Silicon Valley about this real jerk of a person who'd made all their money on web radio, which the other people like mocked as stupid. And I personally think web radio has kind of resurfaced as an alternative to a very video presence-based platform. And obviously any kind of web radio stations are now broadcasting through the web. A lot of terrestrial antennas just are not an option anymore. So it's interesting because it's a niche open source media ecosystem that I think AzuraCast really fits beautifully and does a really good job. Yes, for sure. And that begs the question of when? When did this start? So good question. And in my extensive research before this session and really extensive, the closest I can come to an estimate. And I'm sure Buster Nice and his discussion with Tim Clark says exactly when. But from what I can guess from AzuraCast's Twitter page, like we said, where all truth lives, I think that it's about 2015, 2016. They joined in May of 2016. And Tim Owens and I, who started Reclaim Hosting, started our Twitter account when we started Reclaim Hosting. Like the two were one to one. So 2013. So I believe it's around 2015, 2016. So about six, seven years old now. At least when a public presence was there. That's right. Like when they really, I guess when Buster Nice felt confident enough to say this is a product, this is open source software that we're kind of offering. And you'll notice even in the tool here, AzuraCast at Faustodon.org suggests a move that they have made to Mastodon. And on a free open source software server, which does give you a sense that this is not like premium, like almost like open washing, like we're kind of open, but most of our stuff you got to buy premium to get access to. This is truly open source software. And I appreciate it for that. Yeah, they're walking the walk, which I think leads really nicely into our next question, which is where and what that what we're referring to when we say where. Yeah. And I was, I don't know a where it started literally where he worked or where it all went down, but I do know where you can host it. And I know where you can't host it. So let's start maybe with the way you can't host it. You can't host AzuraCast software or the application in traditional shared C-Panel based hosting. It won't run cleanly in a shared hosting environment. In order to run AzuraCast, you're going to need to run it on probably a cloud provider. DigitalOcean has a one-click installer. ReclaimCloud has a one-click installer. I'm sure there's other hosting software out there or hosting companies out there that provide that. But I do really like the fact that AzuraCast has gone over the course of its short life, has done a lot to make that installation process easier. And to give you an example of that, in ReclaimCloud, which is where I am now, and I do have a test instance that we'll look at in a second up and running, but in ReclaimCloud to install AzuraCast, it's literally you go into the marketplace, you look for the AzuraCast application, you click on install, and then you would find something like AzuraCast... No, I'm going to call this who, what, when, where radio, and then who, what, when, where radio. Terrible, I know. And then you can decide where it lives, etc. And then you would click install. And within 30 seconds to a minute, you would have a AzuraCast server that you can run and install. One of the things I do want to point you to and let me find that right now is to run an AzuraCast software or AzuraCast radio station on ReclaimCloud, you'll go through that process I just showed you, but there are basically two options. You can run it off of a Reclaim.Cloud subdomain, whether it's the who, what, where, when, radio.wc that Reclaim.Cloud, not one of those URLs that flows off your lips, or you can map a custom domain. You have that option and we'll talk more about the software, but that's basically the environment spun up. Now you have the domain you've chosen, whether it's a map domain or whether it's the existing subdomain. And then there are some small changes you have to make if you're using the existing subdomain, because it is a shared SSL cert, so you have to make sure that you give access to that and you create something called an endpoint. But that's all documented in here and we'll link to that. But this is a great document that Taylor updated and we can confirm that the one click installer works very cleanly, mapping a domain in some ways is easier than using our shared Reclaim.Cloud subdomain address, so keep that in mind. It's one of those examples where doing a map domain simplifies your life. And that's it. That's basically the where. You could run it on pretty much most cloud providers. Reclaim hosting has a one click installer and I've run a couple of instances on Reclaim.Cloud without issue for several years now and I love it. Well, how about you tell us how? How? Yes, that's a good question. So we did look at the installer, right? And then once you do have an Azure Cast instance installed, it will be right here, I mean, amongst any other applications you have, I'll basically make it simple and show you that here it is. And this is the link, I am not using a map domain, although I do recommend one, and you would click here and this would take you into the actual software. So I have set up already my username and password, but the first thing you'll see when you come to one of these and actually I'll show you, there's no reason not to. If I sign out of here, the first thing you'll see when you install your Azure Cast is this strange unicorn with a microphone, a boom microphone, like it's really wild, right? It's almost like those, maybe those, I don't know if you remember those glass unicorns that like people used to have, they were almost like bluish glass. Maybe it's an 80s or 70s thing, but they were really weird. This reminds me of those unicorns. Love it. It's very like retro in its own way, but here you'll see that and that's the login page, and what this will take you to, and you'll sign in with a username and password that you decide, because it's the admin account, once you install it is open for anyone to do it quick. And then once you do that, you sign in. And at that point, you'll come here to a profile which will ask you to start setting up your radio station. Now, there's probably a quick kind of distinction I want to make here between when you've done what we've done so far, right? You've actually installed radio, web radio hosting software. And so you're now the admin of that hosting software, like you're running it. And the thing here that's interesting to keep in mind is a ZuraCast can have one radio station, like a regular WordPress has one site, or it can have many. So in many ways, you can run several or multiple radio stations off of one instance of a ZuraCast. So it's a good thing to keep in mind. Analogs in our world of ed tech is like WordPress multi-site, can use many sites. Pressbooks can host many books. This is the same thing. One a ZuraCast instance can host many radio stations. So if you're in the business of providing radio stations for people, a ZuraCast is a really good option, one place to manage many stations. So when you get there, what you're really managing is your new web radio ZuraCast instance, right? So I can name it something like a Zura test, or and I could spell it. And then here is a description. And then we go through, I would put my URL, I am going to get the right URL. So I'll put that in there. So it's just a URL of your radio station, right? And you have all this, you also have details on broadcasting, you have details. And broadcasting is interesting, and it's worth making a distinction. You have a couple of ways you can use your radio station. You can broadcast, which means you're coming on live and broadcasting, whether it's your talking, whether it's your playing music. And then that's fine, you do it and then you get off. And once you get off, the station can revert to something called auto DJ. And auto DJ is just pre-programmed music, songs, culture, whatever that you have uploaded to the server. And that is playing on a scheduled basis until someone comes in live broadcasting. So it can run 24 seven, kind of like watched, if you will, for just media programmed. And then at the point a DJ wants to come in or there's a break in live performance or what have you, that's all possible. And this is the settings for broadcast, which is using IceCast 2.4, which is a pretty standard open source broadcasting protocol. And then auto DJ. And auto DJ is using something called liquid soap, which is one of the major kind of softwares that is running the automatic changing of songs and uploading and scheduling, et cetera. So that's basically what's under the hood. I do want to show you an active server. So you would go through once you've installed it and you'd set up the server. And the idea is once you did that, you would have an actual radio station. So we've created a radio station for our company called Reclaim Radio. And we jump on it occasionally. And someone will play, you know, an hour or two of songs and maybe other people listen, maybe they won't. But like, it's just this idea of not only testing the software, but us being able, because we work remotely, to listen to like a shared playlist or something and kind of get a sense of some sort of connection. So I'm going to look at that quickly and give me one second while I clear my throat. One second, please. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So that's good radio, too. If you're going to be coughing, you want to mute the mic and not cough into the mic on the radio. Same with the video, right? Very good. Everything's a teachable moment. Absolutely. So here is Reclaim Radio. This is one of the many potential radio stations we could create as part of the server. And there's a couple of things here when we get down to the station level, you can clone stations, you can edit a station, delete a station, or manage a statement. We're going to look at manage a station in a second. But for a moment, if we look at the edit a station here, you'll notice it's very similar to those initial settings we created. Each station you create will have a specific profile, specific broadcasting details, specific auto DJ details, and administrative details. So it's good to keep in mind, like different sites on a multi-site, you have different kind of settings you can create for each station based on the needs, based on what it's doing, etc. So that's where you would do that. And then at the point you want to get into that specific station and start managing it, you would click here. And this is the interface for that station Reclaim Radio. A couple of things to look at here while we're in it. This shows you what's on air. What we do with both Reclaim Radio and DS106 Radio is we crosscast or bring in simulcast maybe, bring in WFMU, which is a freeform radio station out of Hoboken, New Jersey, or thereabouts. So that's one of the things we do. And then when someone breaks in live, it goes from WFMU to whoever's live on Reclaim Radio. A couple of other things is you can enable song requests so people can request songs and that will come in. This is a whole detail around streamers and setting up streamer accounts, which is quite nice. This here shows you details around the broadcasting service, like the source username, password, stuff that I shouldn't have public. And then here's auto DJ service. This is where you would go in and create playlists and upload music files. And then this is a list of some of the public pages. Notice there's a Web DJ page where you can link people to get on to something called Web DJ, which we'll look at in a second. There's a schedule. So you can have a schedule of what's coming so people can see that. And that could be linked to another page. There is also a page for podcasts because it actually has built-in podcasting as well. And the difference between podcasting and broadcasting isn't always clear to me. So I think podcasting is just a way maybe it links into those podcast providers. But given it's not something I've played with, I can't say too much about. And this public page is just the main page of your radio station, like where you would send people to see what's playing and all the thing that's happening behind it. We take the Web DJ, there's a, what would you call it, like an iFrame for the player. And we take that and we put that in a completely separate Web page called listen.reclaimrod.io. And so we kind of separate it out from the software altogether. So because everything's iFrames, you have the ability to take it and put it into other Web pages and do what you want with it, which is kind of nice. But I did want to show you quickly some of the options that I'm interested in is this idea of live streaming. So if I click on here, you'll notice you can give various DJs their own account. And with this account, they can take their credentials and they can log in from say they have an application on their home computer or on a computer that allows them to stream directly broadcasting through your station. Stuff like mix, which is an application that does that, or audio hijack, which is an application that does that. And there are many others, but it's basically an application that allows you to take the music, your microphones and all your different resources on your computer there and then stream them directly online so that you aren't depending upon going through the station interface per se to play music and to speak, etc. But that requires a certain amount of setup and a certain amount of knowledge about how to get that stuff set up. It's not impossible. You can definitely use a tool like audio hijacker mix with a little bit of time invested. It's not crazy, but it is overhead. One of the things that Zurich has done that I like is they build into that live streaming option something called WebDJ. And what WebDJ does is WebDJ allows you to stream right from the web. So you basically have that DJ credential that the administrator of the system gave you. So let's just say someone gave me these credentials. And so I'm logging in with those credentials at that WebDJ page. And this is what you would see if you sent someone to the WebDJ page. It would just be this. This is a live Web page that anyone can go to. And if they have credentials, they can stream in. So I do that and I click streaming. And if all goes well, this little green sign that you kind of can see will say you're connected, right? And so once I'm connected, this interface now becomes my control panel for broadcasting to the radio. So for example, I'm going to click on the red microphone and then it says, oh, why don't you see any volume kind of waves here? It's because that's not the microphone I'm using. I'm using this Shure MB7. Once I select my mic, I'm live. This is radio, reclaim. And what we have for you today is a terrible mix of bad music and bad talk. Please stay. So anyway, that's that, right? You see it. Cool. On top of that is you can now mix in music. So on this is a playlist one and a playlist two, right? If I click on that little attachment button, I can grab a song. And I'm going to grab this one only the strong because I've played the others before. And that's a midnight oil song. And you'll see only the strong. It's got all the details. And then I'm going to go over here to playlist two. I'm going to grab another song. The song I'm going to grab is from a different artist. And I'm doing that intentionally just to show you how the metadata shows up differently. And so I'm going to do something like slow nerve action. And so that's by the flaming lips. So we got two different songs there. And so now here I am. And the cue button took me a little bit to figure out when I was playing with Web DJ. And what cue button really does, it allows you to hear what's live or allows you to hear what this input sounds like. This cue button next to stop streaming allows you to hear what's live on the radio. This typically somewhat delayed, correct? That is that will be about 15 seconds delayed. Whereas this will show you exactly what or let you listen to exactly what you sound like. And then cue here will let you listen to the music that's playing. So that's what cue does here. It's just basically a way to listen into what's going out over the radio. This here is a switcher between playlist one and playlist two. So that's pretty easy. You can see that. And I'm going to switch this to playlist one. And then I'm going to play a song. I'm going to play this only the strong by midnight oil. And I'm going to do that. And then I'm going to basically shut off my mic. So I'm not talking over the radio. So I'm going to say and next is only the strong by midnight oil. Will Peter Garrett shave his head during this song? We don't know. Stay tuned and find out. At that point, I turned off my mic and I've let the song kind of run and it starts low. But if I wanted to hear Oh, is everything good with the song? I could click cue and I can hear you can't. But I can in my headphones that oh, that's working great. And then I can now say great. I'm not talking. Nothing's coming out over the radio. But this song is playing. And then the other thing you naturally do when you're trying to do this on the radio is you go over to the radio station and you're like, is it playing? And you'll notice here, when I'm here, it's saying live with Jim Groom, who's the DJ. And then it says only the strong by midnight oil. So immediately the web DJ is taking the metadata from that song and it's pushing it to the player, which very nice. One of the things that Azure Cast does quite well is it integrates these things called web hooks, which allow you to take the data that's going out over the radio station and push it to other applications like Discord, Slack, Twitter, or Mastodon, which is what I've been playing with recently, thanks to Buster Neese, who helped us develop this web hook for Mastodon, which is all the rage, is if I go over to Mastodon, you will see if I refresh the reclaim radio page that the next thing coming is something went a little wonky because it's live streamer name is now live on Reclaim Radio. Tune in. I don't know if it knows my live streamer name, but in a second or so, it should send out more metadata. Let's just see. It didn't. But let me just try one thing. So that's the old one. I wonder if that's getting confused. Let me just do that. This is the new one. And I'm going to go here to metadata. And I'm going to update the metadata so I can do that literally right here. So I'm basically saying send this to Reclaim Radio's Mastodon or wherever. And if it's changed, it will basically change it here. So let's just see if that read it correctly. And I'm not seeing it. So we'll come back in, it may update in a second or two, but when we change songs to the other playlist, it should also show a flaming lip song. So we'll notice that it's all good here live. And now that song has been playing. It's still playing two minutes and 33 seconds. It's getting louder. They're screaming now. They're not happy. Ah, right. I hear it. And so it's too loud. We want to stop that song, right? And then we want to switch to playlist two. But if you had wanted to switch to playlist two without stopping the song with that slide or provide kind of a nice transition. It would. It would basically allow you to seamlessly DJ into that other song, right? I'm not a DJ. I don't know how to do that. But yes, you could do that very cleanly. And then you go here to slow nerve action. You click on that. You mute your mic. And then this song is starting. I'm listening to Q. It's happening. So I know it's going out. And then it's going to take about 10 to 15 seconds for the reclaim radio to kind of broadcast to update. And usually I hit the refresh button and see if it's fine. It's still going there. There it goes. Oh, it did. It changed. You saw it change. Yeah, there it is. Yeah. And then here we'll see if this is actually freaking out or not. But it's not kind of a it was working on the just before. But anyway, it's going to send an update like this. I don't want to spend too much time looking at this. But it's going to send an update like that. That's going to be basically saying, Oh, there's a new song that's playing. And here it is kind of like this now playing power in the passion and not oil. I'll take a look at what that but same thing would happen on Twitter or discord or whatever. So those are web hooks. And that's a kind of a nice feature for the reclaim radio. You can also if you want to test them, send them out here, which I'm going to do and then go back and see is there a problem. And it will say debug. No, I think that worked. So we'll take a look at that later. But that's the web DJ when you're finished, you can stop streaming. Or if you don't want to show a song, you can say your DJ speaks. And I stole this from WFMU. And then you can also send that metadata and that after a couple of seconds, we'll update on that. So I really love in web DJ, you can also control what metadata goes out and people see as well as shifting between songs and then coming on and coming off of the stream as you wish. Right. And then as I stopped the song, I touched this and I'm back on broadcasting. And that will should pick up the change of that. And that also keeps it pretty seamless. If you wanted to go back and play a song, you wouldn't have to manually update that metadata. That would just pop right back into those fields and auto fill. Yeah, it auto fills with your DJ. So if I go back and I do only the Strong by Mid-Ninal again to your point, right, you'll notice that metadata changed right there. But you wouldn't be able to hear it because the slider is on playlist too. A couple of things you got to keep track of, but for the most part, it's a one-stop shop. I like it. It's not bad, right, for getting your kind of, your thing going. And if you want to do it, the idea being is if there's overhead to like audio hijack and mix, that can scare people away because like, I got to buy an application often or download one that's a bit more complex versus here's your credentials, go in there, use, use Azure Cast Web DJ. The one thing about Web DJ is it's working off of you uploading songs, right? So it does kind of assume that you have some MP3s that you want to broadcast hanging around, which isn't impossible to get, but a lot of us in this moment are so used to streaming services that that's not where we're kind of keeping MP3s anyway. Oftentimes they're on some storage disk that is in some closet somewhere, but maybe it's a good time to rediscover your MP3 collection. I don't know. Could be. I will say my husband and I do kind of want to reinvigorate our DVD collection because there are some holiday movies that I want to watch that are not available on streaming right now, and I'm not very happy about it. So same kind of thing. I agree with you entirely. In fact, I've been doing that. I've been archiving DVDs like for years now because of that because I find that streaming, and this is a whole nother conversation, but relevant, I find that streaming services, there are enough holes where you feel like you're being pigeonholed into watching certain things again and again, and Netflix has just gotten terrible in that regard. And I'm just kind of like, I want freedom from some of these predefined selections because the licensing around that stuff is a nightmare. And I'm sure that kind of translates well into why they don't have streaming services built into this Web DJ because of licensing, because of potential lawsuits. We have found running DS106 radio for near on 11 years is that when you're small and you only have a few listeners that you fall under the radar where no one really cares. And that's a good place. But if you're a radio station that is at a university or has a fairly decent listening public, you won't fly under the radar and you have to play ball with a lot of that stuff. So that's a very different kind of community and one to think of obviously as you're setting up a software like this. So that's it for the Web DJ. I do that's kind of been one of the things I want to do a little kind of like tutorial on to get people set with. But beyond that, you do have a lot of the logs reporting profile broader stuff. But that's the kind of, you know, meat and potatoes I believe of getting in and using something like a Zura Cast for a specific station and getting people onto Web DJ. For me, I don't know, again, we're not dealing with a critical mass of people in DS106 radio. But Scott Lowe is one of the people who has been a DJ there often thought that it would be a brave new world to get people comfortable with something like Web DJ and talk, you know, because a lot of what happens on Reclaim Radio or maybe DS106 Radio is people talking and sharing stories and like maybe playing a file or two, but not a full blown DJ list of like, you know, here I am, you know, changing the way you understand music, right? It's more of a sharing thing. So in that regard, that checks a lot of the boxes for that. Love it. So that's a Zura Cast. I'm going to ask you on a scale of one to 10. Scale of one to 10, Amanda. Where are you with a Zura Cast right now? I'm feeling 10. 10. I'm out of 10. That's good. Not a six. No, not an eight. Not even an eight. I'll give it to you. It's a 10. I have a special place in my heart for a Zura Cast because of DS106 Radio, but also because it is a truly fiercely open source software and you've got to respect that. And he's fighting the good fight. He's putting out, I think, great software and he's making it freely available. And I think it would be great if more people not only took advantage of this software, but also gave back to the developers that created it. And whenever there's an open source recognition day, I try and promote the Zura Cast because I think, you know, he's doing a lot of work for folks. And sometimes that can be thankless work when you don't get the recognition and sometimes the paychecks that you rightfully deserve. So, all hell, Buster Nees. All right. We are going to end this recording and we are going to say thank you, everybody, for watching. Catch you on the clip.