Welcome back, everyone! Choose your player to the right to start listening, or click on the big Play button to start listening in your browser.

Happy Holidays!
- Kevin

As the more intrepid of my visitors are already aware, the 2008 Holiday Radio Stream is now live. To tune in, click the giant play button on the right-hand side of the page, or look for the player of your choice beneath that. For those of you with iPhones - you can listen in, too! Just follow the instructions here to use the ‘Internet RadioBOX’ app to connect to the stream. I’ve been listening in during my commute (on Chicago’s 3G network) for the last week, and there’s barely a hiccup! If you use this method to listen in, please leave me a comment and let me know how it works for you.

Happy Holidays!
Kevin

Oh, wow, is it already that time? Well, as the decorations, TV commercials, and holiday movies will attest, this season seems to start earlier and earlier every year. It’s surprising, what with the economy being what it is, but I guess nothing stops the commercialism of Christmas! Holding with the tradition of this site, though, we’re not going on the air until Thanksgiving. Please be sure to come back and visit us then to get your holiday music fix!

Peace,
Kevin

This is good stuff! I’m a fan of a cappella anyway, so I love this time of year for listening to the Whiffenpoofs, etc., belt out their favorite holiday tracks. This one is particularly good, though.

Thanks, B.A.!

That’s right!

The 2007 Holiday Season is officially upon us, which means that the Holiday Radio will start streaming Christmas music 24/7 to the tubes out there on the Internets. As with every previous year, the Radio is running on a bigger, faster, more powerful server than ever before, so we should be able to accomodate even more listeners. I’ve made some changes on the back-end, too, so it will be easier for me to manage and update the system.

The official launch will take place on Black Friday, when most people here in the U.S. (excluding yours truly) will be caught up in the hustle and bustle of holiday consumerism, and could probably stand to take some time out to relax, listen to some music, and try to reconnect with the real spirit of the season.

Peace,
Kevin

I’ve just removed about 100 or so songs that bordered on being too offensive for most listeners. That Bob Rivers sure is funny but, man, he pushes it sometimes.

If you look to the right, under the ‘Play now online’ header, you’ll see a big flash-based Play button. This will stream the music to you via a proxy, which should help people on slow connections or behind corporate firewalls. Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you!

All of the song data has now been loaded, and the radio is up and running. Enjoy!

Happy Holidays!

Kevin

The final track list for this year’s launch is just about complete. There are a total of 1746 tracks currently, comprising 4 straight days of music (though there are probably around 100 duplicates because many albums contain the same popular tracks: i.e., Mariah’s ‘All I Want For Christmas’). The source repository that is currently syncing is >7GB. If you’re interested, you can download the list by clicking here.

The streaming server daemon (sc_serv) is running on a Linux machine with Fedora Core 3, an Athlon XP 2100+ processor, and 1GB of RAM. It’s connected to the Affinity backbone through a Gigabit switch, so the upper user limit will probably be higher than the 32 user max that it is currently set to. Once it starts to max out, I’ll bump this up as bandwidth allows.

Are you excited yet?

Hey, everyone,

I’ve now got the server in test mode while I make a few final tweaks to the configuration, etc. Like every other year, the streaming radio is going to be better than ever: faster server, faster connection, more songs (4 whole days worth!), and more features (e.g., mobile phone support). While I’m working on the last details, you can enjoy one of my favorite albums - Christmas at the [Boston] Pops.

I’ve been looking for some way to embed a flash-like player so that people behind firewalls (that means you, B.A.!) can listen in as well. Unfortunately, it seems that Flash’s support for this type of stream is all but non-existent. I’m looking at a couple commercial solutions to see if they’re viable but, for now, it looks like I’m going to launch the site without this feature.

The mobile phone support is pretty exciting. I’ve just now upgraded to a more data-friendly phone (the T-Mobile MDA, a.k.a. the HTC Wizard) with EDGE support, and I was able to connect to the stream and listen in for a solid half-hour before I was convinced that it wasn’t just a fluke. If you’ve got a copy of TCPMP on your smartphone, please give it a shot and let me know how it works!

Peace,
Kevin