The Beautiful Stream of Music

Sometimes there’s no substitute for doing things yourself, because you can, and because it’s fun. Being a DJ on your own radio station falls into that category, and like most other media creation activities on the Mac, it’s easy and fun to do. Programs like Nicecast make it so.

I don’t have the time or interest to be an internet DJ, but I have occasionally fired up a stream for a handful of friends for an hour or so. Nicecast is perfect for this. The concept of Nicecast is that you can choose an app to hijack and broadcast it in a couple different ways. Rogue Amoeba’s blurb states that it’s great for broadcasting to the world, or just across your house, and they do not lie.

When you fire up Nicecast, you see a window that has controls for starting/stopping the broadcast, a status indicator, a level indicator, a selection area for the audio source, and several buttons to additional Nicecast settings.

Choosing the app you want to use as your audio source couldn’t be easier. Set the source dropdown to “Application”, click the “Select” dropdown, and choose your app. You can also set the Source to System Audio or Audio Device. The latter is the way you could, for example, play live music and run it from your mixer into your Mac and stream it to the internet. Powerful stuff.

Ok, so now we have set iTunes as our audio source… how does that help us DJ? Doesn’t being a DJ involve being able to open the Mic and yammer at people inbetween, during, or instead of playing songs? Yep. And that’s where the effects panel in Nicecast comes into play. Clicking the “Effects” button on the main app window opens the Effects window. Clicking in an empty slot on that will allow you to insert an effect to be applied to your music stream. The effect you want to add if you’d like to DJ is the Voice Over effect.

You can click on the Voice Over panel’s “Editor” button to adjust Device, Crossfade, and Autoducking features. Crossfade lets you adjust how much of the output volume is allocated to the voice source vs the main audio source. Autoducking presumably lets you have it such that the music volume would lower as you begin to speak, and increase again as you stop, but I haven’t used this feature in practice.

Before we can stream, we need to choose a streaming server configuration. You can use the built in server to let people connect directly to your Nicecast server, or you can set up to stream through an external service, such as Live365. The advantage of the internal server is that it costs nothing and is easy - just choose that option and off you go. The disadvantages are that people are connecting directly to you, which means you can saturate your bandwidth, and you are opening yourself up to external connections. The advantages of the external servers are that they can potentially let many more listeners connect, and they keep your computer from being directly accessed. On the other hand, they cost money and require additional configuration and another layer of learning to get your music out to the world.

Are we finally ready to rock? Whew. All we wanted was some music, right? In our case, we have iTunes set up as our app of choice, so we click Nicecast’s “Start Broadcast” button, switch over to iTunes, choose a song, and off we go.

And … woohoo!! We’re streaming. Just one thing. How do people hear our music? Easy enough, click the “share” button if you’re using the internal server, and you’ll be presented with a URL to let people connect with.

The Internet address is the one to give to people accessing you from outside, while the Local address is what you’d use if you just wanted to stream to other computers in your house on the same network. If you’re using an external shoutcast type server, you’ll have a URL assigned to you by that host instead, and neither of these will apply.

Ok, so now that I’ve babbled on and on and pasted pretty pictures for you, what’s my take on Nicecast? My take is that for basic audio streaming, it couldn’t be simpler. Select an app, set up your server options, click “Start Broadcast”, and you are in business. Nothing more to do.

It did take me a little fighting to figure out how to do voice over… I had to find the Voice Over effect, figure out that you had to click “editor” and click the “Start” button in there as well, before starting the broadcast, etc, etc. It would be nice if the user manual had a list of recipes, such as “To DJ with voice over capability” but they really don’t. Although they have a pretty good index of the effects that can be applied, there are no examples provided anywhere.

Still, I have to give Nicecast an A at least. It’s easy to use, does the job, and on my fiber connection, several people can be connected at once and things just keep humming along. I like it.