WREK Atlanta, 91.1 FM

We got here first.

Sort of.

We used to say we were the first on the planet, and in a way we were (more on that in a moment). But recently the folks over at WXYC noticed our claim, and stated their case for WXYC actually being first. And we have to agree, it looks like they did it first, both as a "beta test" and as an official release.

However, we need to maintain a shred of dignity, and here's how: we did it ourselves. We didn't use an outside conferencing software package (which is what CUSeeMe and VAT are), we didn't have the fine folks at SunSite helping us, we didn't have anything except a lot of campus bandwidth that we were looking to use inappropriately. So we wrote our own code.

Here's the story from the man himself. A computer science student at Georgia Tech at the time, and host of the widely feared metal show "WREKage", John Selbie wrote the software, from scratch, that put our signal on the wire. The system consisted of two major components: A) server software that sampled our audio at 64 kbps (8 bits per sample, 8 kHz sampling rate, mono) and then sent that out to B) client software that received and decoded that stream. The stream was uncompressed audio -- at the time (1994), machines that could compress LIVE audio were still pretty expensive, and of course most listeners didn't have the computing horsepower to uncompress the live audio stream either.

Here is John Selbie's account.

The software was ready and had been tested pretty well on the gatech.edu network in October 1994. Eric Buckhalt had brought the internet into the WREK studios, and had setup a 386 PC running BSD (or was it Linux ?) with an audio feed plugged into the line-in jack in the soundcard. It was running the server software that handled the routing of audio to the remote clients that were connected. The first client test on the gatech.edu network was on a Friday night in October 1994 in the Sun lab at the Mason building. WREKage was the first show to be heard (Bob was hosting). If you count the network between the Mason building and WREK as the Internet, then you could argue that was the first time we had it working.

So we had it working on the gatech.edu network in October. Now we wanted to try it out over the Internet. UNIX workstations (with audio) that had a connection to the Internet were a rarity in 1994. Heather Kelley came through for us; Heather was a former WREK music director who was by then a grad student at the University of Texas at Austin. We ftp'd the program to her and she had it run from her lab in Texas and was listening to WREK that morning. Thus, the first client from the Internet to connect to our server and listen to audio.

Now this is where the dates get hazy. We keep saying it was November 7th, yet I could have sworn it was on a Saturday or Sunday in early November 1994. According to my calendar that would have been Nov 5 or Nov 6. It wasn't until a few months later that we actually went out of beta and into release. In between that time, WXYC came out with their solution using a UNIX audio-conferencing tool called VAT ("Van's Audio Tool"). They also had Sun Microsystems helping them out to some degree.

There you have it. Selbie's software was eventually released as open source (before that term was as sexy as it is today) as Cyber Radio 1, and was used by KZSU to put their signal on the net.

We have continued to enhance our internet streaming presence, deploying our third generation system, built by student Chris Sidi, around April 2001. It replaced our 2nd generation system, which was based on RealAudio. More recently, we implemented our current system, primarily developed by student Eldon Stegall, in January of 2007 using icecast for our live streaming. We also upgraded our website, our second major revision, in January of 2007 offering instant playing audio via flash audio players, work primarily implemented by student Victor M. Virreira.

Comments? Email streaming-at-wrek-dot-org.