Ever Wanted to Make Your Own Online Radio Station? Here is how to do it..

Ever Wanted to Make Your Own Online Radio Station? Here is how to do it..

OVERVIEWS

▶ Just before you read this article, take  a look at what I was able to do. I just became an RJ in a few minutes!

▶ Check this out! I am sure even you will feel like becoming one!

▶ There are potentially various uses of setting up an online radio. That may be to share information/music among your friends in your college, office or community.

▶ In fact, you can share your thoughts with the whole world!

▶ Well, if you are ready to spend your next 15 minutes reading this article, I am all ready to teach you to start your own online radio station for free.

▶ This is a pretty big article but I am sure you will learn something new at the end.

Be a part of our knowledge sharing. Share this!!

That Big Smile On Your Face!

Radio, I get quite nostalgic when I say that word. We have all grown up listening to the radio right from our childhood.  We would have listened to various songs, music, talk shows, educational shows and more on it.

Now, if you can close your eyes and recall those beautiful moments for a few seconds, I am sure you will have a big smile on your face. Well, there may be many reasons for that smile but there is only one thing responsible for it -  Radio.

There are many of us who always wanted to be there in the studio doing all the RJ stuff like playing music, jingles, talking all day, cracking jokes and more.

Some of you might have dreamt of taking part in a radio show, some of you would have wanted to play only the music of your choice, some of you would have wanted to show your crazy talent but would have not got a chance to do so.

Well, how about starting your own radio station that everyone can tune into?

Sounds crazy, right?

Well, if you are ready to spend your next 15 minutes reading this article, I am all ready to teach you to start your own online radio station for free.

This is a pretty big article but I am sure you will learn something new from it.

What All do you Need to Set Up an Online Radio Station?

Not much actually!

• You will need a broadcasting machine worth Rs.22 lakhs or $40,000.
• You will need a studio, maybe, that would be around Rs. 50 lakhs or $90,000.
• Some Radio Jockeys (RJs), office staff, equipments and few more things.
• On the whole, it would cost you around a few crores or few million dollars.

(Okay, I was kidding!)

Fortunately, you will not need anything unusual except a PC with a broadband connection, a microphone (a headset with built-in microphone will be better) and some time of yours.

Spreaker – Make Your Own Online Radio Station with Ease

Without having to invest a penny, you can have your own radio station. How is that possible? Well, that is what the Spreaker is all about!

It’s a freemium service where you have both free and premium plans.

There are many such radio services available online but my choice was Speaker for its simplicity. It lets you create, broadcast and share a radio show across the Internet with ease.

Speaker provides you with various necessary tools like a mixing console, a music and sound effects library and also the ability to broadcast live radio through a widget which can be embedded in social networks, blogs and websites.

To get started, you will have to visit the Spreaker website here and sign up using your Facebook account or choose the option “sign up without using Facebook”.

Next, you will be shown a new window from where you can follow some of the coolest and popular people on Spreaker. (You may be one among them soon.)

Up next, you will be asked to introduce yourself. Make sure your microphone is well connected and all set to use.

Now, click the big yellow “Rec” button. Click allow on the flash player setting pop-up to start recording. Just give a brief introduction on who you are and what you to do on your radio station and again click on the yellow button once you are done to stop recording.

Once again, click on the yellow button to preview the introduction and if you don’t like it, you can re-record it (click on START AGAIN) or if you are fine with what you have done, click on “PUBLISH”.

Up next, you will be directed to the main dashboard from where you can completely handle all aspects of your radio station.

How to use Spreaker and Run Your Shows on it?

Now that you are in the dashboard, let me go further and help you go on air.

In the top left of your dashboard click on “BROADCAST”. You will be given 2 options, one is to broadcast from Spreaker and the other is to upload from your computer. Choose “Broadcast”, enter a title and click on “NEXT”.

Click allow in the flash player pop-up and the “Deejay Console” will open. The Deejay Console is where you will be doing your broadcast from. Well, this is the place where everything happens.

By default, The Broadcast LIVE! mode is selected, however, you can switch between 24/7 Non-Stop mode (only for premium users) or Record a new podcast mode where you can record your shows but it is not live.

The entire console is divided into various sections. The picture below will help you understand it better.

The above snapshot must be able to give you a rough idea but let me give you a better picture of it.

To start  broadcasting, you will have to click on the Record button as seen above. To stop the broadcast, you will have to click the same again.

As seen in the picture, the microphone section will let you control your speech volume and also switch between qualities like HI (high), MED (medium), LOW.

What is the point of running a radio station if you don’t have music in it? Well, the 2 deck panels allow you to add music from the playlist that you can broadcast.

Now a quick question pops-up. How to add music to the playlist?

That’s a good question you have! Of course, without having uploaded any music till now, how will you able to play music?

You will have to upload all your music, jingles, sound effects to the MUSIC LIBRARY section in that can be found at the top right of your dashboard.

Here is the link to make it easier for you: http://www.spreaker.com/dashboard/library

Upload all that you want to play on your station to your music library. Since, you will be using the free version, you will be able to upload up to 10 hours of songs! Well, that should be more than enough! Whenever you want to upload new song, delete the old one and upload the new one, that’s it.

Once you have uploaded the songs there, in your Deejay Console, go to the Playlist section and click on the “add” button.  There, you can search for the song or you can simply choose it from the LATEST and click “Add”. This way, you can add the songs to playlist.

Once you have added songs to the playlist, close the library and return back to main window. Now from the playlist, you can drag and drop songs to Deck 1 and Deck 2.

From Deck, you can play the songs while you broadcast.

Once you start your broadcast, you will see a link at the top right of the page which you can copy and share with anyone.

Using this link, anyone can tune in to your broadcast and enjoy your show LIVE.

If you have already connected your Spreaker account with Facebook, then whenever you start a broadcast, you will be given an option to publish the broadcast on your Facebook page as well. This will notify your friends on Facebook about your new episode and will let them listen to your show.

There are lots more stuffs you can do with the Spreaker. Just take some time to explore it. I am sure you will be a better RJ. You will also have loads of followers.

Final Thoughts

You can use Spreaker to do broadcasts about a lot of things! It may be in your school, college, university, office, a community or others.

It has a lot of potential applications and your imagination is the only limit.

Just before you start a broadcast make sure you have enough songs, sound effects and jingles in your playlist. This will make it easier for you to run your show during the live broadcast.

Once you start your radio station, make sure that you do regular broadcasts, this way you will have more followers and gain more popularity.

Also connect Spreaker to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and share your shows in there.

Let me know how you plan to use Spreaker? Do you find it interesting? What say?