Help and support for beginners. No need to reserve a place – just come.
Workshop: Grooveshark for beginners (3.30 to 5 pm).
Grooveshark is an international online music search engine and music streaming service, allowing users to search for, and stream, music that can be played immediately or added to a playlist. Unlike other music streaming services (for example – Spotify, We7, Deezer) Grooveshark does not require you to login through a Facebook account.
At the workshop, we will …
Show you how to get started with Grooveshark.
Search for and play music you like.
Create a Grooveshark account so you can make your own playlists.
Agewell Community Computing: Tuesday 24 January 2012 (2.30 to 5 pm).
About Soundcloud.
Soundcloud is a way of recording sound directly from your computer to the Internet, and then sharing the audio file with your friends, family, or (if you want to) everybody. It’s free, very easy to use, and perfect for sending spoken messages across the Internet.
At the workshop, you will learn how to …
Create your own Soundcloud account.
How to record your voice on the Soundcloud site, for example – a message to your family (a lot easier for some people than having to type it). You can add a photo too, if you want to.
Save your audio recording (as private or public) with its own web link.
Share your audio recording in an email, so that the person you are emailing to can listen to you, instead of reading you.
Share your audio recording in a personal blog, or on Facebook.
Here’s an example Soundcloud audio.
Click on the triangular ‘play’ button to play the audio track.
This YouTube video explains a bit more.
Click on the triangular ‘play’ button to start the video.
Music Online – a short course at Hackney Silver Surfers.
The Hackney Learning Trust is funding two more short courses about Music Online. They are free to Hackney residents aged 50 or better. There will be five sessions in each course. The two courses have identical content. The tutor is Julie Usher.
Course content.
Finding and listening to music on the internet.
Learn about iTunes, iPods, online music stores, YouTube.
Internet radio.
Downloading and purchasing music from the internet.
Internet music forums.
Staying safe and copyright.
Music Online A (January – February).
This course has been postponed.
Music Online B (March – April).
Exactly the same as Music Online A, except …
Starts: Wednesday 7 March.
Ends: Wednesday 4 April.
Enrolment: Wednesday afternoon, 29 February (2 to 5 pm).
Assessment and enrolment.
Hackney residents involved in the MiCommunity Intergenerational Project will not be able to attend the enrolment for Music Online B on 29 February – so we will arrange a separate enrolment session just for them on a convenient day.
More information.
If you cannot attend for enrolment on the days and times arranged, or if you need further information – please contact Rick by email to courses@lawns.org.uk or phone 020 7254 2183.
Help and support for beginners. No need to reserve a place – just come.
Workshop: YouTube Disco for beginners (3.30 to 5 pm).
YouTube Disco is a simple way to find music on YouTube. We will show you how to use it at the workshop. If you can’t wait, watch the YouTube video below.
Click on the triangular ‘play’ button to start the video.
Agewell members can reserve a place at the YouTube Disco workshop by sending an email to acc@lawns.org.uk .
It’s very different from traditional terrestrial broadcasting. When you listen to Internet radio, you are listening to sound streaming from the Internet. There are no transmitters, no licences and no need for a studio full of expensive equipment. Music performance rights must be respected (they are not cheap) – but talk is free. Anyone with a little technical knowledge can make their own Internet radio station for a very small cost. There are now tens of thousands of small, independent radio stations all over the world. They are not competing with the big operators, just doing their own thing.
At the workshop.
We will show you how to find and listen to some of the small stations, and some of the big ones too.
We will demonstrate our own low-cost, but fully-functional Internet radio station (Radio Freedom Pass), streaming directly from The Lawns.
The workshop will double up as our end-of-year Agewell Computer Club party – with music from a small, established Internet radio station.
Workshop: Tuesday 13 December 2011 (3.30 to 5 pm).
Cancelled.
We have just discovered that the conditions for joining Spotify have recently changed.
Now the only way to join Spotify is through a Facebook account. If you don’t have a Facebook account, you can’t use Spotify. Existing Spotify account holders are not affected – nothing has changed for them – but we were expecting to help new learners join Spotify.
Facebook is unsuitable and unsafe for Internet beginners, so the workshop we had planned cannot go ahead. We will do something else instead.
Sub-workshop: Tuesday 13 December 2011 (2 to 5 pm).
We are going to set up the USB turntable so that Agewell Computer Club members can digitise their old vinyl disks. It will be attached to the computer which we call the ‘Agewell Media Machine’ (in the corner of the drop-in area). The USB turntable creates MP3 audio files from the tracks on the vinyl. The MP3 files can then be copied to a flash drive and taken away.
We are hoping to get this started as a demonstration next Tuesday 13 December, and then do more the following week – and more frequently in 2012. It will happen in the drop-in area, so you can’t reserve a place. If you are interested – just be there. You probably would be anyway.
Click on the orange/white ‘Play’ button.
Recorded outside Dalston Kingsland Road station
at 12.20 on 19 July 2011.
In their own words …
The London Sound Survey collects the sounds of everyday public life throughout London and compiles past accounts to show how the sound environment has changed.
Amongst the daily urban hubbub there’s information about who lives here, what they get up to, how they enjoy themselves and what they believe in. Sounds come in fashions from singing canaries and windchimes to car horns that play Old Dixie. They announce developments in technology, the city’s growth, and social and demographic change. They tell us of shifts in the make-up and scattering of London’s wildlife.
Stereo sound recording and playback was the first immersive electronic medium and it’s still the only really practical one. Listening to a recording of the sounds of a place or event gets the imagination working and recreates some of the sense of being there. It feels like a worthwhile end in itself simply to share those experiences with whoever’s willing to listen.
NB: the original date for this was 9 August (we had to postpone it).
For the last few weeks, we have been showing you how to find and listen to small, independent Internet radio stations (eg: SHOUTcast Internet Radio for beginners, VLC media player and Icecast Internet radio). Now we would like you to join us in bringing to life a new community Internet radio station. It already exists. It’s provisionally called Radio Freedom Pass, and it was launched (very successfully, with a different name) 30 July at the Piccadilly Community Centre.
It’s surprisingly easy to do. You don’t need a broadcast license or special equipment – just an ordinary computer, a cheap microphone and free software. The only cost has been SHOUTcast server hosting – £5 for a basic Pay As You Go account which will last us several months.
The free software we use to stream out to the Internet is Winamp – the same program we use for streaming in from the Internet – listening to SHOUTcast stations. Winamp is on every computer at The Lawns.
Even the newest absolute beginner can get involved in Internet radio – that’s why we are doing it.
A pilot broadcast from The Lawns, Tuesday 20 September 2011.
The launch event suggested to us that community radio might be best when broadcast from places where there is a crowd – for example – a meeting, a workshop, an exhibition, a party – or an end of term event at The Lawns. As we are expecting a lot of people to come The Lawns on 20 September anyway, we thought we might wrap up our series of online music workshops with an Internet radio party – and broadcast the result. So here are some reasons to be here …
Help create a party mood.
Talk to the microphone – we hope to have somebody really good to show you how to present and interview. You can try doing it your way, as an interviewer, or an interviewee.
If you have a collection of MP3 music (the digital format for most online music), we will show you how you can become an Internet DJ with your own radio show. At the moment, we can’t broadcast music ourselves,as we don’t have the necessary music licences – but we can show you how easy it is.
If your music is on vinyl or CD, it could probably be digitised to MP3 quite easily. We could talk about that too.
Tell us your ideas for an Internet radio station run by older people.
What time, and where?
We won’t start before 3 pm – in a corner of The Lawns, while everything else is going on. When we all have nothing else to say, we will switch to a SHOUTcast music station until 6 pm. If you want to listen online instead of coming to The Lawns, visit radio.agewell.org.uk after 3 pm.
Several people have asked how to find and play the Internet Radio stations we play at Agewell Computer Club.
They are all ‘SHOUTcast’ stations. SHOUTcast is a very wonderful Internet project that helps to restore flagging faith in humanity – free software enabling almost anyone to set up an Internet Radio station without expensive equipment. There is more info on the Wikipedia SHOUTcast page.
The easiest way to play SHOUTcast stations is to use a web browser to open http://www.shoutcast.com/, then use the search form near the top of the page. The streams with the highest bitrate have the best quality sound.
A better way is to download and install ‘Winamp’ (a media player designed for SHOUTcast) from http://www.winamp.com/. Winamp is very ugly to look at, but works well.
Podcasts are series of recorded audio files that can be downloaded to your computer (or MP3 player), so that you can listen to them when it is convenient. The downloads are usually automated. Subscriptions are typically free.
A good example is the ‘Hackney Podcast’ (our Website of the Week, 14 June 2011), which has had 21 editions since it started in July 2008.
From the Podcast Wikipedia entry …
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released in episodes. The word replaced ‘webcast’ in common use with the success of the iPod and its role in the rising popularity and innovation of web feeds.
The mode of delivery differentiates podcasting from other means of accessing media files over the Internet, such as direct download, or streamed webcasting. A list of all the audio or video files currently associated with a given series is maintained centrally on the distributor’s server as a web feed, and the listener or viewer employs special software known as a podcatcher that can access this web feed, check it for updates, and download any new files in the series. This process can be automated so that new files are downloaded automatically. Files are stored locally on the user’s computer or other device ready for offline use, giving simple and convenient access to episode content.
In many respects, this is closer to traditional publishing models associated with books and magazines (as opposed to radio, which uses a live stream).
At the workshop.
We will show you how to …
Download and listen to podcasts with the free VLC media player as your podcatcher.
Search the BBC podcast directory for series that appeal to you.
This is the fourth in our series of workshops about music on the Internet.
VLC is the default media player at Agewell Computer Club. That means we use it to play all our music and video files. It’s also a very good streaming media player. The only thing we can’t use it for (at the moment) is to listen to SHOUTcast Internet radio (SHOUTcast was the topic of our 12 July 2011 workshop). However, VLC is an excellent player for Icecast Internet radio – we will pay special attention to that at the workshop.
VLC is free, open-source, not tied to any commercial interest, and very good. There is also a portable version that you can install on your own flash drive.
At the workshop.
We will show you how to …
Create music playlists with VLC.
How to use VLC to download and organise podcasts
How to use it as an Icecast Internet radio player.
This is the third in our series of workshops about music on the Internet.
From the Last.fm Wikipedia entry …
Last.fm is a music website, founded in the UK in 2002. It has claimed over 40 million active users based in more than 190 countries.
Using a music recommender system called ‘Audioscrobbler’, Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user’s musical taste by recording details of the songs the user listens to, either from Internet radio stations, or the user’s computer or many portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm’s database (‘scrobbled’) either via the music player itself or via a plugin installed into the user’s music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user’s profile page. By April 2011 Last.fm reported more than 50 billion scrobbles.
The service is free for users living in the UK, US, and Germany. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user’s favourites.
Last.fm offers customized virtual ‘radio stations’ consisting of uninterrupted audio streams of individual tracks selected from the music files in the music library.
Stations can be based on the user’s personal profile, the user’s ‘musical neighbors’, or the user’s ‘friends’. Groups based around common interests or geography also have radio stations if there are enough members, and tags also have radio stations if enough music has the same tag. Radio stations can also be created on the fly, and each artist page allows selection of a ‘similar artists’ or ‘artist fan’ radio station.
At the workshop.
Last.fm likes to be thought of as a music discovery and recommendation service – but we will focus on Last.fm as a way of creating personalised Internet ‘radio stations’ based on your music preferences.
This is the second of our series of workshops about music on the Internet.
SHOUTcast is software for creating and listening to Internet radio. At the workshop, we will look at …
The SHOUTcast website –
A searchable directory of Internet radio stations with a built-in media player; easy to use but the search is sometimes slow.
Winamp –
A SHOUTcast player that you can download and install on your own computer. Very reliable, but remarkably ugly. We have it on most of our computers at The Lawns. There is also a portable version that you can install on a flash drive. Winamp is also a general-purpose media player – efficient, but not as good as our preferred VLC (which can do everything except stream SHOUTcast).
The Hackney Podcast was set up in 2008 to record the borough’s different faces: one of Britain’s poorest places but culturally one of its richest; an area of London profoundly marked by its history but, as the Olympics loom, caught in a frenzied period of change. From its first days, the podcast – available free to download – has provided an eclectic mix of politics, environmental issues and scenes from local life alongside cutting-edge art, literature and music.
Agewell Social Network:
At the workshop, we will …
Agewell Community Computing:
Music Online – a short course at Hackney Silver Surfers.
Workshop: 
We will show you how to find and listen to some of the small stations, and some of the big ones too.
Workshop: 
Sub-workshop: 
Several people have asked how to find and play the Internet Radio stations we play at Agewell Computer Club.
Workshop: 
Workshop: 
Workshop: 
Hackney Podcast.
