|
How did smoothbeats.com get started? Originally, it was just a way for me to listen to my music at work without having to lug a case full of CDs back and forth every day, back in October 1999. Once we hit 10 listeners, I started updating the playlist more frequently. In April of 2000, we moved to smoothbeats.com from our old domain, treefiddy.com, because we got tired of always having to spell it out for people. Since then, we've grown to what you see now, listed in hundreds of directories, and with thousands of visitors to the web site every day. Can I use my own client to connect to the Smoothbeats chat? Yes, absolutely. We use IRC for our chat server, so you can connect using your favorite IRC client. Our server address is irc.smoothbeats.com, and the channel name is #smoothbeats. Popular clients include mIRC, trillian (Windows), BitchX, Irssi (Unix), Ircle, Snak (Mac), or grab the latest version of Mozilla for any platform, which includes "ChatZilla". Where can I download the music you guys play? You can't. Click on the tracks in the recent playlist to search for the music on amazon.com, or use napster. How come some tracks are unedited while others are obviously clean radio mixes? At Smoothbeats.com, we believe in freedom of expression and try to play unedited versions of most of the tracks in our playlist when possible. However in many cases, it is simply a matter of playing what is available to us - we don't have every version of every song ever recorded at our disposal. Many of the tracks we play are custom remixes which were only made available in a clean edited version. Finally, there are some tracks in which the dirty version is pointlessly vulgar and the edited version is just a better track. What software does smoothbeats use to broadcast? Originally we had planned on using shoutcast, however only the server was available on multiple platforms, and we needed something that could handle the audio source under linux as well. We ended up using Icecast for the server, and developed our own custom solution for the audio source, playlist management, and web interface written in perl and utilizing the libshout library. The relay stream is re-encoded using the LAME codec. If you are interested in using our open-source linux broadcasting solution, feel free to contact us, we would be glad to help out.(Note: we've sinced switched over to Shoutcast servers) How much does smoothbeats.com cost to run and how much money does it make? You don't want to know how much it costs to run. It's a labor of love, we don't make a dime from it. How can I help promote smoothbeats.com? Tell your friends about us. Link to us. Put a smoothbeats banner at on your web site with the following code: <A HREF="http://www.smoothbeats.com"><IMG SRC="http://www.smoothbeats.com/graphics/banner.gif" BORDER=0></A><BR> |