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Most recently updated on $Date: 1999/03/07 04:21:00 $ (GMT)
Well, how do I put this... the experiment is over. I believe it served its purpose more than adequately, demonstrating to both Engineers and Managers within RTÉ and to the world-wide on-line community that distributing audio over the network was both feasible and possible with few resources. See the status page for my letter to the crew when we ended things.
RTÉ now have live feeds for both Radio 1 and 2FM as well as RealVideo content on their news page.
The remainder of the information in this document describes the history of the experiment, and lists additional detail about the mirror sites.
The aim of the RTE (RTÉ [Radio Telefís Éireann] To Everywhere) EXPERIMENTAL demonstration project was initially to assess the viability of making small segments of news broadcasts from the Irish national radio service available on the Internet via anonymous ftp and the World Wide Web. The project brought several minutes of news headlines from RTÉ Radio 1 in Dublin twice daily in the form of digital sound files, for a period of about two years prior to RTÉ having their own presence on the 'net.
The programs initially selected were the "Morning Ireland" broadcast at 8 A.M. (Irish time) in English (7 minutes weekdays, 5 minutes weekends), and Craoltar Cinnlínte Nuachta as Gaeilge (news in the Irish language, 3 minutes) ar a 8 I.N. (am na hÉireann). The latter was made available from July 28, 1994, whereas the 8am news files were made available from sometime early in 1994 (March?).
Rather than just have a single days' news/nuacht, about a week's news headlines were kept on-line. From the feedback we received (100% of which was very positive) this experiment proved to be a great way for ex-pats to keep up with news from home.
The format adopted for the recording was (of necessity!) Sun u-law. To
make the archive work, the date was encoded in the name, e.g.
19940322.au for the March 22, 1994 news file, and
nuacht_19940728.au for the July 28, 1994 nuacht (as gaeilge)
file. As the experiment progressed, the dual problems of differing audio
formats and file size were both tackled.
Via use of the freely available au2wav package (the C source file is ulaw2wav.c) it became possible to also offer a WAV format file that was playable on most PC systems.
The GSM
compression scheme ("toast") was used to shrink the u-law audio files;
this was so successful that it was possible to copy the file over a 28.8
Kbaud modem and pipe it through untoast to the
/dev/audio device on a Linux system and get reasonable
streaming performance. This was adopted after some experimentation with a
alternative (shorten, g723) compression schemes which were not nearly as
effective and/or portable.
Later, when RealAudio became available, the experiment used the NT version of their encoder (and an extra series of downloads and uploads) to provide a downloadable (not streaming!) RA format file as well.
Finally, when it was empirically found that the generic zip (PKzip)
compression scheme worked modestly well on the WAV file, a
lateswav.zip file was also made available. This file was
usually quite a bit smaller, but the .gsm and .ra files proved to be the
ultimate in compression, usually achieving a 4 or 5 to 1 compression
factor.
Some past issues of Morning Ireland used to be available as a media-on-demand service. This may have been discontinued.
Note that RTÉ broadcasts in RealAudio format are also available on the World Radio Network. Last time we checked, you could get the following:
The main links above will start the RealAudio stream right away (the
.ram files), whereas the download links will defer
playing it until the transfer is complete (by fetching the
.ra files). RealAudio files will work in "streaming" mode
over a 28k baud modem or better. There are now RealAudio players for Unix
systems (yea! finally!), including SunOS 4 and 5, Linux, and a few others, as well as
for the more common-or-garden (dos/win, mac) systems; check their home page for details. Of course,
your computer must have audio capability (e.g. sound card).
One thing the project discovered very quickly was that we were dealing with very large files (480KB per minute of air time for the .au and .wav files). We strongly urged people to think about the bandwidth implications and about those trying to do real work on the host machines before they selected a file. This was necessary given that the ftp/www space was essentially "surplus", on machines dedicated to other purposes.
Look at the 8 A.M. blip in the University of Limerick's IP traffic profile to see what effect the simple upload of the original file from Limerick to Virginia had. This is graphical confirmation of (a) just how big these files were, and (b) the need for mirror sites. Even with the smaller GSM and RA files, the latter (mirror sites) are still very much a necessity especially if the demographics of the audience are mismatched with the existing internet bandwidth and connectivity.
Because of this, the experiment from the beginning urged users in the RTÉ listening area to use their radios, as were those in a position to receive RTÉ Radio 1 and 2FM by satellite or on shortwave (see the RTE web site for satellite and shortwave info). The primary aim of the experiment was to make a little bit of RTÉ broadcasting available to others, out of range of RTÉ and without access to a satellite receiver or shortwave equipment.
GOOF.COM, courtesy of
Matt Mead, and his very
nice FreeBSD based PC.
Yours truly did the
work here. Many thanks to Matt for his patience and tolerance of
our rather large files! This experiment was made possible thanks to the efforts of Liam Relihan at the University of Limerick, Aengus Lawlor (Rohm & Haas, formerly Dublin Institute of Technology), Mark Riordan (Trinity College Dublin), and Pat Murphy (National Radio Astronomy Observatory, formerly University College Dublin). Thanks also to Eamonn O'Brien and Áine McManus for the mirror site down under, to Shawn Mehan (formerly UNC, now at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Scotland) for the Sunsite mirror, to Neil Costigan (Media Communications) for the Scandinavian mirror and to Iarla Kilbane-Dawe for the Cambridge mirror. Also thanks Owen J. Murphy at CSUSB for the California site.
The experiment was humbly dedicated to the thousands of ex-pat net residents who hungered for the sounds of "home".