Yup, thanks to an interesting mix of listener support and new friends all over, we began fiddling with 24/7 streaming in December 1999. Officially after a couple month beta period that got out of hand and ate up all the bandwidth in Hawai`i, IRH-Live! made it's Official debut February 15th, 2000 pumpin out da kine on high quality 24/7 Windows Media Streams - Soonafter, I added a Magick Music Box System that plays from a library of over 5700 Hawaiian tunes on cds directly into a listener donated Windows NT Server where it is encoded and sent across da net to VitalStream where we have unlimited listener capacity.
For a while (between May and November 2001) we streamed up at StreamAudio but after many many problems with them dropping the streams all time, I moved the stream to VitalStream on Nov 19, 2001. Our current live stream plays through the Windows Media Player and by all reports is dependable and rock solid.
Thanks ever so much to our friends at the Heart of Texas Internet who hosted us for our first 15 months until we overran their servers and used up all their bandwidth and had to move on. I will never forget the kindness and generosity of Rich Ziegler, their owner during this period of experimentation and expansion.
Our Weekly Programs...
Internet Radio Hawai`i 's on demand programs and special featurers are recorded on a Macintosh G3 desktop 233 computer with 256 megs of ram and a 500 mhz Sonnett Encore G4 upgrade chip running at 501 mhz. I record the program off of cds, cassettes and lps. Sometimes I use a Kangaroo Stereo microcassette recorder/player to take you to the beach or other location.
The mike I use is an EV RE -20. I mix everything to the computer through a Mackie 1402 mixer and we have an old MODUlimiter BL-40 compressor limiter in the mike line.
I use Deck 2.6.3 for PowerPC recording software. The programs are recorded at 44,100 kHz, mixed to become Sound Designer 2.0 files and then encoded to our various flavors of RealAudio in Mono & Stereo.
Our programs are then sent via ftp to our RealAudio provider, the International University of Japan in Tokyo. With help from the ASCII Corporation of Japan, the University came to my rescue when I was going to close IRH back in 1996. We have been served off of their network ever since then and are very grateful for their support, friendship, help and dedication. .
Biggest Mahalos go to Dr. Yasuhide Yamanouchi and Keisuke Kamimura for their time, energy and listenership.
- it delivers a very stable stream.