articles

[dyne:bolic]

By Adam Hyde, 5 November 2002

[dyne:bolic] is a CD released by dyne.org and created with the help of many, but most notably Public Voice Lab [http://www.pvl.at]. The CD is a bootable CD-ROM which contains a GNU / Linux distribution; you put the CD into your drive, restart and taa-daa – a live running version of Linux. In itself this is a wonderful thing because it gives anyone wanting to try Linux but too afraid to reformat their drive the opportunity to give Linux a go. Nice.

However this is really just the beginning. Dyne.org has also been working for some time on a suite of GPL streaming softwares including the excellent MuSE (Multiple Streaming Engine). MuSE allows you to mix simultaneous audio sources (from file, the network, or a soundcard input) together and output a single live MP3 (audio only) stream.

So, combine [dyne:bolic] and MuSE and you have the start of a bootable toolset of streaming softwares. Take it anywhere for personal, media, cultural, artistic use, plug it in, restart and the result is your very own streaming machine...and that’s just the beginning. To make the world an ever better place dyne.org has gone one step further. There are really a lot of hurdles that must be overcome if you want to learn to produce live streams for the internet. In the first place you need an encoding machine, encoding software, and an internet connection. There are a lot of people who have or can quite easily achieve these basic requirements. However there are two issues that make streaming tricky:

1) you need to know how to create a live stream

2) you need access to a streaming server (not always necessary – WindowsMedia encoder, for example, can act as a encoder and a server from your local machine).

These two parts of the jigsaw prevent many from streaming.

[dyne:bolic], with the help of publicvoice.fm [http://publcivoice.fm], goes a long way to overcoming these obstacles by incorporating a simple mechanism on the CD. In short, [dyne:bolic] will automatically set up an account for you on the PUBLICVOICE.FM server and configure MuSE with your new account details. All you have to do (more or less) is press ‘go’.

It’s all free, you can download the CD and burn an image or write to the nice people at dyne.org and they might just send you some copies of the CD (lovely artwork), and it’s free (as in ‘software’). The PUBLICVOICE server which is configured to receive your stream is the open source Icecast Server. All well and good. The only inconsistency is that MuSE produces MP3 streams, which is a proprietary format. But this will be fixed in November 2002 with the addition of Ogg Vorbis functionality (a .free. codec). If you stream, know someone that streams, or want to stream yourself, then you really should have a copy of [dyne:bolic].

[http://dynebolic.org/]

Adam Hyde <adam AT xs4all.nl> is an artist, pseudotechnician and co-founder of radioqualia [www.radioqualia.net], Open Source Streaming Alliance [www.streamingalliance.org], Frequency Clock Free Media System [frequencyclock.montevideo.nl], and Open Sources (tba)