TWICE a week, Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson co-host an internet radio talk show. No big deal. What is a big deal is that Holtz lives in California while Hobson lives in the Netherlands. And neither has access to a radio studio. Yet with a couple of PCs, a broadband connection and a fashionable piece of free software, they can bridge the Atlantic and broadcast to the world.
Their secret is a software package called Skype. Released in August 2003, Skype was designed to allow users to make free telephone calls over the internet. But the sound quality is excellent and the software also allows callers to exchange files and play music while they are talking. Radio buffs are now exploiting the new technology to become both interviewer and DJ on a shoestring budget. In doing so, they may be starting a broadcasting revolution, one that democratises the industry and makes the amateur broadcaster king.
Skypecasting, as it is called, is possible because of another trend dubbed podcasting. Podcasts are MP3 files that are automatically delivered to subscribers’ MP3 players when posted online (91av, 12 February, p 24).
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Now with Skype, podcasters can do more than just post an album by their favourite band or record a monologue on current events. They can interview a band on the other side of the world before playing its latest set, or bring together overseas experts to discuss a topic. With a little know-how, Skype allows these conversations and music clips to be saved as MP3 files, posted online and then automatically downloaded by listeners.
What’s more, it’s cheap. With Skype, people can be added to a conference call at no extra cost. Skype also provides better sound quality than a telephone call. They use a similar amount of bandwidth, but compression algorithms designed by Swedish company Global IP Sound allow Skype to handle three times the data, so the spectrum of sound spans three times the frequency range. That gives the impression the caller is in the same room.
“We knew if we were going to pull off a show that sounds good we couldn’t use a telephone – the sound quality is terrible and we couldn’t afford it,” explains Holtz. “But Skype sounds like a CD.”
The boom in skypecasting is just beginning. Around 99 per cent of the 33.5 million Skype users just make telephone calls with it. But that could change as more people learn other ways to exploit it. Enthusiasts such as San Francisco-based Stuart Henshall, co-founder of news blog Skype Journal, use a variety of tricks to turn a Skype telephone call into a skypecast. During a conversation, a Skype account produces two digital sound streams. One comes from the Skype account holder speaking into a microphone. The other, via the account holder’s headphones, is the person or people speaking on the other end of the line.
To turn this into a single MP3 file that can be podcast, Henshall and his colleague Bill Campbell, a software engineer based in Kelowna, British Columbia, open an extra, silent Skype account on one of the PCs. This account then joins them on the line to make it a conference call, in which all the voices are captured in a single, incoming sound stream. Campbell has also created yet another account and plugged an iPod into it instead of a microphone, so that one of the “voices” in the conference call is music they can play when they want.
“They may be starting a broadcasting revolution, one that democratises the industry and makes the amateur king”
Once they have bound all the music and voices into a single sound stream they either pipe the stream to the Windows sound recorder using software called Virtual Audio Cable or record it using voicemail software. Then, as in podcasting, the sound recording is converted into an MP3 file and posted to a website, which allows subscribers to the show to automatically receive the skypecast on their MP3 players.
“We applaud what we think is a clever use of the software,” says Skype spokeswoman Kelly Larabee in Phoenix, Arizona. Other skypecasters are using a piece of hardware called a mixer, which costs around $40, to combine audio streams from the Skype-connected microphone and headphone, and an attached iPod, and record the output as an MP3.
Campbell says most users will not have the technical know-how to create MP3 files from their Skype conversations that can be podcast. But last month another piece of software, called HotRecorder, was launched that converts a Skype conversation into a music file that can only be played on a proprietary media player. It is only a matter of time before other software becomes available to create MP3 files that can be downloaded and played by everyone, says Henshall. And that’s just the start. In future, he says, people will write video programs to interface with Skype, so you could even watch the person you are talking to online.
