Internet Broadcasters! Broadcasting from your iOS device could be just around the corner!

By DrewWeber, 4 April, 2013

A lot of us Blind folks are interested in radio. Some of the lucky ones are probably doing an air shift in a commercial station as I write this. :) The rest of us, may be doing that one of these days, but for the time being, we get our thrill by broadcasting on the internet. Today, when we think of hosting a show, we think of needing a desktop, or laptop computer. This all may be changing, very soon! How cool would it be to broadcast an internet radio show, from wherever you are? It seams a lot of us have iOS devices, and the future of hosting a show from our IPhone or IPad is litterly right around the corner. Their are several apps I want to cover here. First, because it's kind of what makes all this come together, let’s talk about Audiobus. (You can find a demo up at the Applevis podcast section). Audiobus, allows for live app to app audio streaming. It's quite accessible, and allows you to connect your apps together. Apps can either be an audiobus input, an Audiobus fx (between the input and output), or an audiobus output. You can have multiple inputs, (multiple apps playing audio at once), that live stream to an Audiobus app that acts as an output, (reseiving the audio). One advantage as Voiceover users that we gain when using Audiobus, is not having Voiceovers speech travel through the Audiobus pipeline. So we can still be gaining VO feedback, but no one else has to even know VO is enabled. Each day more apps are updated with Audiobus support, Now, let’s dive into where internet radio broadcasting comes into play! At the time of writing this post, two of the apps that I will mention here are in Beta with Audiobus support. Bossjock Studio is currently in the app store, and a lot of us use it on a day to day, (Current beta includes Audiobus in and output support). KoalaSAN Broadcaster is probably a new one to a lot of us. KoalaSAN is not yet in the app store, and is completely in its beta stage at the time of this writing. Bossjock studio: allows for numerous carts, which can be loaded from your iOS devices music library, dropbox, etc. Bossjock also includes a mic button. All audio goes through AGC processing, (compression and limiting). You can export to various file formats and export via mail, dropbox, ftp, etc. Its main mission was and is podcasting with no post processing/editing needed! and it does a heck of a job! Carts=doubletap and play, play multiple carts at a time. (I'm sure you can see how that process could transfer over into manually cross fading of music like dj's of the 90's with CD decks. Djay: a DJ style application for the IPhone allowing for automatic cross fading/(auto mix) auto volume leveling etc. Djay pulls from your iOS IPod library, with no need for conversion to another file format, taking up less space on your device, and less time because no reencoding is needed. (latest update brings Audiobus in support). KoalaSAN, (still in beta not in app store at the time of writing), A shoutcast/icecast source, (you input server information into KoalaSAN, and it will stream to server of choice). either from the iOS devices microphone or acting as an Audiobus output. Mp3 and Ogg formats are supported. Also dumps, archives the stream and allows for uploading of recordings to ones dropbox account. I'm sure your mind is already putting all of this together. Connect any app that acts as an Audiobus input, through Audiobus to an Audiobus output, and you get that audio in the Output app, no matter weather it's recording the audio, or Shout/Icecasting that audio out to a server, live, in real-time! But lets shift away from music players for a moment. What if you want to pre-record, or host a live concert, with an instrument app, That is as well possible. To sum it all up, theirs a lot of cool technology right here! and right around the corner! It's way to cool, and trippy, that we will all be able to host our internet radio shows right from the eas and comfort of our IDevice from any location! Written by Drew Weber @roosterloop

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By DPinWI on Sunday, April 21, 2013 - 20:20