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Get radio active

imc-uk | 28.09.2005 16:10 | Indymedia

Below are some highlights of recent audio contibutions to the IMC-UK newswire. Anyone can upload audio recordings, be it speeches, interviews, or their own reports. If you are interested in collaborating on creating and distributing radical radio programming, get involved by joining the IMC UK Radio list.

There are a variety of groups and individuals working within the IMC UK framework to produce radio programs. Indymedia Radio London produce an hour long show broadcast in London by Resonance FM every Wednesday between 1pm and 2pm. In the past they have mobilised to provide streaming coverage from the IMC set up for DSEi2003. Another regular show available online and broadcast on Resonance FM is Slow Small Peasants with audio landscapes on social and ecological justice every Friday 2-3pm. The show evolved out of Diversity Radio which disseminated the diverse views of participants and others during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg 2002. They also covered the (COP6) Convention on Biological Diversity.

rampART radio was born when a studio was created at the rampART social centre in September 2004 as part of media production facilities aimed at providing independent media coverage during the London European Social Forum held in October. When the ESF finished the station continued, adding a variety of regular live programs, and putting out daily news and events listings. rampART radio will shortly celebrate it's first birthday but has been considering proposals to de-brand the station and concentrate on building up and strengthening a wider radio network collaboration.

Indytastic!
Indytastic!


In Manchester, for over 3 years, Under The Pavement has been providing reports from local activist communities and news from Indymedia. It is broadcast on ALL FM 96.9, a local community radio station, every other Monday from 9pm to 11pm.

For the G8 mobilisation in July, a new group was formed called the Radical Radio Coalition which brought together radical radio makers from around the world. The result was a repositry of in-depth multilingual coverage about the protests and the issues. Plans to stream from the IMC set up in Edinburgh met technical difficulties but rampART radio filled the gaps with five days of live up-to-the-minute coverage rebroadcast by stations around the world.

You can find loads of radical stations to listen to online via radio.indymedia.org

imc-uk

Comments

Hide the following 4 comments

I wonder why there is so little audio content ?

29.09.2005 13:08

Funny how very people contribute audio in the UK. Some other IMCs seem to get much more. Certainly the global radio page indicates that many more people in north america are regularly producing audio content.

Audio recording is a much more established technology than say video or digital photograph and it is much easier and quicker to produce audio pieces than an edited video. Audio probably has bigger audiences as well, expecially in the age of podcasting.

Indymedia UK could provide the phone in service that sometimes gets set up for big demos, that would help to get more people contributing reports I think.

With more people carrying around MP3 devices and mobile phones capable of doing digital voice recording that might also help but anyone could record onto an old tape recorded or mini disc recorder so, again, I don't understand why there is so little content.

Perhaps it due to lack of outlets - places you can be sure your efforts will be noticed - as there is little point in producing stuff that nobody will ever hear. Of course the same is true of video content and yet people do seem to be increasingly uploading short clips.

I think it would be a good idea for Indy UK to have a stream as I notice that apart from rampART radio (is that an indymedia project?) their doesn't appear to be a constant stream for UK radical content.

Adam


Check out past content and get involved

29.09.2005 19:38

You might be pleasently surprised how much content is actually produced. It's hard to tell these days because the Indymedia search engine has been replaced by google so you can't search specifically for articles with audio and there is not specific audio newswire for the UK site. However there is quite a bit of audio uploaded...

I have trawled through and made a playlist for each month going back about a year.
The playlists contain all files regardless off content or quality - all I have removed is duplicates and mp3s that don't play at all.

These are .m3u playlist and should work on most systems. Just click on one and open it in your media player and it should play. It will take a few seconds buffering at the begining of each track and then should stream assuming you have enough bandwidth.

Unlike a streaming radio, if you find one track boring, you can just hit forward and get the next track. You can also change the order or whatever although you will probably want to ensure you don't have random or shuffle enabled as some tracks are sequential, ie. different parts of a single interview.

I will go back further and produce playlists for previous months and then work on different themed playlists. It's a manual process so don't expect it over night ;-)

James Brown


podcast it innit

29.09.2005 21:14

better than a stream anyway - podcast rocks.

related radio wise - see last may 04 community radio feature
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2004/05/292182.html

radiola


Easy links to audio / video content

01.10.2005 16:42

Those monthly m3u files are a good idea - I didn't realise there was so much audio available. Could do something similar with video content as well, although all the different movie formats might make that impractical. I also await the themed playlists with interest.

An audio / video newswire on UK IMC would also be good, so broadband users can jump straight to the alternative to the latest TV news.

Of course, we must remember that not everyone's got broadband, and over a dial-up connection publishing and downloading audio files of any size is going to be too slow for most people. With this and the various movies from DSEI, I can feel a bit of CD burning coming on for the benefit of people who don't have broadband...

PS the audio I uploaded was captured on a cheap DV camera. I'm still not competent enough with the camera to get footage worth publishing as video, but I discovered almost by accident that it's also a handy way of capturing audio without carrying too much equipment around.

Simon