Air Progressive

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• Listen by visiting the site: http://www.AirProgressive.org
• Air Progressive has been operating since about March, 2011.
• The station has still not be formally announced.

How can you help

We have been running the streaming radio station, Air Progressive.org, for a while now. I think it is actually a great addition to progressive media. But what we need is to have more people listening in and helping decide what programs are really good, some not so good, and what times they should be, etc. Also, we need to check to make sure it is not doing something stupid like repeating the time over and over with no program.

The station is streaming only, at least for now. You can listen in by just visiting the web site, AirProgressive.org on your computer. We have not officially announced the station, but hopefully we'll be ready for that soon.

The way the station works is there is a master "super playlist" that lists places where we can download programs from content providers. Every hour at 15 minutes before the hour, the program wakes up and rescans all the websites where these programs can be found. If any new programs are found, it downloads them (to the server), re-encodes them for fairly low-data rate transmission (32kbps) and queues them up in the correct time slot.

Here are the sort of thing we need to listen for:

1. Basic operation... should be playing something reasonable all the time.
2. Fidelity -- I think 32Kpbs is fine, esp. for talk shows.
3. Transitions -- top of the hour transitions should be on time and not stop your player. Should not start a new show at the very end of the hour without enough time...
4. Content -- Are the shows good ones? Too many reserved words (F-words, etc.) Good hosts? Progressive point of view?
5. Schedule -- Are the shows scheduled at a good time? Sometimes, we have to wait for the shows to be provided from the East Coast morning show so we have that day's show.
6. Playmode -- This is how the shows are played, i.e. when a program does not have a show that day, goes on hiatus, etc. For example, Democracy Now provides shows only for weekdays. If we try playing it on weekends, what shows are played? Friday's show over and over, or do we play Thursday, Friday, or Friday, Thursday, or Thursday, Wednesday... Not an issue right now b/c we're not playing DN on weekends, but that gives you the idea. Another example is BBC world news. It is only about 45 minutes long. What do we do with the rest of the time? Play the same show again? Play the previous show? I think the latter is what is being done now.
7. Local programming -- Still up in the air. Could have a separate channel for occupysd, like Air Progressive.org/occupysd. I wanted to get this done but I've been so covered up with OSD in general, it has not happened. We could:
   • Have local talk shows. I thought it would be fun to try but it is a huge commitment.
   • record meetings, like GAs or committee meetings and play them on a dedicated OSD channel or on the main streaming channel.

Known problems

• Time announcements still as PDT, which is one hour off. That should be fixed soon.

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