Radio Free Mightybytes

The simple need for holiday party music inspired the creation of Radio Free Mightybytes, our own Internet radio station.

A collective “Egads!” welled up from the Mightybytes conference room when, a mere day before the maiden mid-December tasting of our homemade Mightybrew, we realized that our holiday shindig would be without music, not because of a lack of tunes (we had plenty) but due to an inadequate delivery system.

Maybe we were collectively preoccupied with year-end project needs, or perhaps it was just vast amounts of holiday spirit clouding our judgment, but a party without music is, well, just kind of tacky, especially in an office as music-centric as ours is. Thus, the last minute realization of our oversight sent us into a tailspin trying to rustle up a solution. Sure, we could set everybody’s iTunes to play a random selection of songs, but we wanted some sort of cohesiveness rather than cacophony to the whole experience. For the last holiday party we threw a few years back, I devised some elaborate hybrid solution that involved my home stereo, AirTunes and extensive speaker rigging throughout several rooms in the office. It was nowhere near a perfect solution and certainly not one we had the time to implement this year.

Enter Nicecast. After a bit of online research, Whit found this software from Rogue Amoeba and installed it on our server for the low low price of $40.00. Nicecast, currently only available for Mac OS X, works by ‘hijacking’ any application’s audio output and rerouting it to your IP of choice, thus creating a listenable stream that can be accessed via the Internet or, as in our case, an internal network.

Nicecast could be a suitable app for collaborating online with fellow musicians, webinars, training, audio conferences, and so on. For our purposes, it made the perfect radio station for our internal network. There is a bit of latency from machine to machine so for the party it took several ‘ready, set, go’ attempts of simultaneously hitting play from different machines in different rooms to create a synced environment. But it worked: we had the same music playing from everyone’s machines in each room. Now all we needed was music. To simplify the process of adding music to our ‘station’, Whit made a snazzy Applescript that allows us to drop music from our iTunes library onto an iconified shortcut that automatically imports and places them into the station playlist. Spiffy.

In our next office space (we do plan to move this year), we will no doubt seriously consider many technology options when it comes to flexible media routing, but for now, thanks to the fine folks at Rogue Amoeba, along with an assortment of homemade hors d’oeuvres and snacks, our own online radio station provided a perfect accompaniment to the hand-crafted red, amber and pale ales served to guests.

Radio Free Mightybytes was a great experiment, but we have taken it down, mainly due to the server load. Our friend Lindsay Muscato put us on Gapers Block and we got a huge response from it. Too huge, in fact. But we’ll no doubt give it another run later this year. Thanks for checking it out.