He Is Losing His Mind and He Feels It Going

If you've tried to tune in lately, you may have noticed that the stream has been... uh, not always there. The reasons for this have been manifold. The server was on the fritz for a while, then I had to switch stream providers, then this most recent outage was because the new stream provider changed the URL of the stream on me. Why would they do such a thing, you ask? Well... because I asked them to. And then forgot to change the link.

Annnnnnnnnnnyway, I think we're stable now. Everything works at the moment, the stream is streaming, and when you click the little play button, music comes out. Fingers crossed...

Pause for Station Identification

This is just a quick note to inform my loyal listening public that Technical Difficulties Radio now has an actual website:

http://www.technicaldifficultiesradio.com

I'm also experimenting with different formats, rather than endlessly recycling the static playlists of yesteryear, so you should start hearing all the latest stuff as soon as I get it (such as Youth Code's much-anticipated "Commitment to Complications", which just landed in my mailbox yesterday afternoon). You should also start hearing the usual glitches until I get the kinks worked out.

And also a brief mea culpa - no live broadcast last Friday or this one, due to circumstances beyond my control (scheduling and illness, respectively). Next Friday should be on.

Onward and upward!

Back in the U.S.S.A.

Technical Difficulties Radio is dead! Long live Technical Difficulties Radio!

We narrowly escaped the event horizon of the black hole left behind when Live365 imploded, and are once again streaming over the netwaves!

Seriously, check this out!

You'll have to forgive the somewhat sloppy web design - I literally put the page together just last night, using HTML and stylesheets I shamelessly stole lovingly borrowed from this blog. I must say, losing Live365 may yet turn out to be a blessing in disguise. All of a sudden, I have a lot more flexibility. Maybe I can display cover art. Maybe I can display the correct cover art. Maybe I can finally fix the weird Unicode issue I always had with Live365, and Leæther Strip, Einstürzende Neubauten, and Δaimon, among many others, can get the props they deserve. Maybe at long last I can finally achieve world domination! Ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa! Ha! Ha... Uh, where was I? Oh, yeah.

Anyway, yes. Technical Difficulties is back, until the next disaster strikes. Huzzah!

And Then There's Nothing

Well, folks - looks like this is the end of the line for Live365.com. If you haven't seen it, here's the bad news:

We are sad that we are closing our doors at the end of the month. There are always possibilities that we can come back in one form or another, but at this point in time, January 16, 2016 is the last day that Live365's streaming servers and website will be maintained and supported.

I don't know what that implies for Technical Difficulties Radio just yet. Will streams continue to stream forth automatically until the servers crash? Will I be able to send a live feed from my server, or just be restricted to my backup rotation? Or, as seems most likely, will it all just go away?

Compounding this is one of the reasons Live365 folded in the first place: the elimination of the small broadcaster licensing category. Again, I have no idea what this implies for Technical Difficulties Radio. There's a lot of pessimism about the future of independent broadcasting, and concerns that the more successful stations will abruptly find themselves put out of business by spiking royalty payments. But my listenership is not that large (and I like it that way, thank you very much), and so having to pay royalties on each individual stream doesn't sound like it will be that expensive for me, but I just don't know yet.

So. Lots of things up in the air. I am exploring alternatives to Live365 right now, and I will let you all know what happens. It won't necessarily be easy or straightforward, but right now, I think I can manage to keep Technical Difficulties alive. Fingers crossed...