Fuck running XP in VirtualBox...

When you're trying to get Microsoft products to play nice with Oracle products, in a GNU/linux environment, there's a word for that.

Stupid.

In the meantime, we're configuring Airtime. It's going to ROCK.

http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/

Son of Bride of Grotzilla!

Greetings from the Fracture Radio Center for Really Advanced Projects!

I'll let the acronym sink into your head for a minute. Apt, no?

Anyway, say hello to the new Grotbox. Contained within is a super powerful Athlon II, running at a paint-stripping 3.1ghz. 6gb of RAM and a pants-rending 2.1tb of drives round out the package nicely.

The new server will be running Debian Squeeze, with a crufty old copy of Windows XP running the same copy of SAM that you've come to know and love. This will give us the flexibility to experiment with less crufty open-source streaming solutions, without the heartbreak of interrupted service.

Anyway, I'm psyched. I hope you're all psyched too. ;)

"All things come to an end, especially when Dell manufactures them."

I wrote those words over 2 years ago, celebrating the death and rebirth of our favorite pile of trash server, the venerable Grotbox, and they ring true as ever today.

The grotbox is down. The northwest corner of my office no longer wheezes with the breath of cooling fans. Sitting in a motherboard box is the Grot's replacement - an Athlon II with 6gb of RAM. Refreshingly incompatible Dell power supplies and cases continue to flummox your humble admin, but we shall win through with new hardware.

In the meantime, Fracture Radio continues on, as a virtual machine hosted on my desktop - a clever simulation of actual crap hardware, running on not-so-crap hardware. It's the future, after all.

RIP Grot the third. 12/9/2009 - 3/15/2012

Clockwheel freakout!

Long story short, I've hit upon a game-changer. Now our favorite completely random radio station is just a little less random. Stay tuned for new programming such as:

Weird Stuff at Four - A collection of B-movie disco, Italian Film Library jams, Turkish Freakouts, and Balkan Jazz.

Eighties at Six - Why six? Because fuck you!

Downtempeaux Lounge - A sultry serving of slower and groovier deep cuts, with a generous side of synths.

All times Central... so check us out!

We've moved streams!

Hello covert llama smugglers. Our new stream address is http://silver.neostreams.info:8241

If you want it to open in your browser, just put a /listen.pls on the end, like this:

http://silver.neostreams.info:8241/listen.pls

WTFis this Grotbox thing, anyway?

[Edited @ 10:37pm]

I've noticed that some of our listeners, staff, arms dealers, mammal smugglers and prawn smelters are unsure of what the Grotbox does. Initially, I was going to make a really horrible chart in MS paint to explain it visually, but I had an attack of laziness. (..and then an attack of industry, and stellar MSpaintage!) Instead, I took the most improbable image from a GIS of the term"Grotbox." Search it on Google if you don't believe me. I'll wait.

See? Crazy, no? Ok, so the Grotbox is just like any machine that connects to a Shoutcast server, except that it is built out of trash, and designed to run with a minimum of human intervention. It sends a single 128kbit/sec stream of audio to our shoutcast server, in beautiful Dallas, Texas, which relays it out to up to 100 listeners.

I hope you're all thinking the same thing, and I hope it's "But why don't you serve audio to everybody from that one machine, and avoid paying $15 a month to pipe it down south before listening to it?" (If you're not thinking of this, I'll wait until you are. You might wanna bookmark the page. Again, I'll wait.)

I'm not wearing underwear, so minds out of the gutter.

We rent a seperate physical stream, in a far-off datacenter, as they have massive amounts of cheap upstream bandwidth that I do not. Is that grammatical? I can't tell! Anyhow, we simply can't host 6.4mbit of upload from a home connection. Yes, we have fiber running to within a mile of us, but they don't give us a pipe that big.

So we do the next best thing, and rent huge pipes in Dallas.

To sum it all up, the Grotbox is a sad cyborg disc jockey, sending a teeny stream to Texas, where all the bandwidth is. Our Dallas-based streaming server slings the data to you when you press play.

Simple. :P

Grot The Third! Now with SAM Broadkaster!

Hiya, Fracturelings! For the one person out there still listening to the Grotbox, I've got great news! My Chinese arms dealers just sent me their yearly tribute (we're big over there) and in it was a shiny, spankin' new copy of SAM Broadkaster. Hourly station IDs are back, as is random-but-logical playlist rotation. Expect things to tighten up as I go through the 30,000-odd (some of them very odd) songs on the drive and lovingly hand-weight them for your listening enjoyment. Thanks to our 2 listeners that make us the number one radio station on some certain small sunken islands in Thailand and Micronesia. You guys rock!

Anyhow, I'm off to strip down a bunch of chocolate assault rifles.

(Edit: 10:27pm) Ok. The chocolate assault rifles are all jammed with orange marmalade, and I'm pleasantly flummoxed. Anyhow, after a short outage, the Grotbox is back up, with a smooth and snappy BBE-flavored sound. All the classic psychoacoustic limiting you've come to love, but with rich robust bass and silken highs. Enjoy!

Grot The Third!

All good things come to an end, especially when they're Dell power supplies. I guess then, that the word "good" really doesn't apply. Ok. Let me start this over.

All things come to an end, especially when Dell manufactures them. The Grotbox's power supply fan ingested some sort of small mammal or bit of "case fur" and met its end. Being a Dell, it had a proprietary power supply that I couldn't replace without spending money. Fortunately, I am a resourceful techfae, so I replaced the ailing Dell machine with (here's the fantastically clever part) another ailing Dell machine. It's got a power supply that is nonstandard, and yet refreshingly incompatible with Grot The Second's mainboard.

Screwy, ain't it?

Anyhow, the copious waste heat from the Pentium 4 provides an ideal microclimate for jade plants and freezing faeries alike.

Until it blows up again. Don't fret, though - I've got a pile of Dell machines to burn through.

Weeeeeee're back, baby!

...at least, we are for the next 30 days. I could say more, but the SPA might be listening. Instead, I'm going to think about lizards, and Tony Danza, and Subarus.

Yeah. That's the stuff.

Aaaanyhow, those of you who have missed the hourly station IDs and the velvety output from the L2 Ultramaximizer and a copy of You Wah Shock! can listen again. Classic Grotbox goodness is back, at least for a little while.

Those of you who have no idea what I've just said (and that may be the lot of you) can just enjoy our 24/7 stream. It'll be extra-good for the next month. I promise.

Thanks to Priki for the photo!

The Grotbox is dead!

Long live the Grotbox!

Without going into too much detail, our copy of SAM Broadcaster (bloated, kludgy, lovable mess that it is) is pinin' for the fjords.

Elements of the Beta Bates Software Brigade and Tony Danza for a Brighter Tomorrow are researching solutions.

In the meantime, there will still be Fracture Radio, but our hourly station IDs will be silent.

(Alas, I lost the attribution to the fine CC licensed pic I used here. Just that kinda night, I suppose...)

(Edit - 9:14pm)

Does anyone know of a program comparable to SAM Broadcaster that's freeware? I need something capable of heavy automation, that can use DX effects or Winamp-flavored DSP fx, and can dynamically modify the playlist so we can have our beloved station IDs back. If anyone knows anything, or has a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend that might, please infospew me. Thanks, gang.

-bb

Fracture Radio is back up....

Hey, gang! Just letting you know that the Fracture Radio outage starting at 2:40am this morning has been resolved with a little help from our malevolent net overlords at Time Warner. Full service has been restored.

All 2 of you listening can tune back in. <3

(thanks to pyroclastichawk for the image - if I was a computer, I'd look like that every morning!)

Grotbox adjustments...

Howdy, gang! I've just finished fixing a bunch of database irregularities on the Grotbox. The master record of what has been played, how many times a song has been played, and whether or not I liked it suffered a blowout. To our two regular listeners, I apologize for the hardcore metal/MF Doom/Free Jazz blowout of the last 2 days that resulted.

To this end, I just spent the last 4 hours hand weighting everything in the new database. Expressing an opinion on a song on a 1-100 scale, at a rate of 2000 songs an hour, is not an experience I'd like to repeat again any time soon. I do it out of love, and for our 2 brave listeners. (Hi, guys!) Anyhow, somewhat normal service has been restored, though some fine-tuning will occur over the next month.

I'd write a few more paragraphs, but my eyes hurt, and my printer just printed... something.

(and thanks to shankool007 for the image!)