The KAF Radio is an online station that featured anime and Japanese pop or rock music. It has had many incarnations through the times.
The first radio station started 26 August 2005 and ran on an actual Shoutcast radio server. KAF had gotten access to a server through a special join arrangement with a web radio station host and a friend.
Music streamed through a defined block of time on a temporary server during setup. Neopets fansite NeoExtreme shared the other time blocks, but their own members were discontented that KAF received a portion of the time (that KAF had a right to).
During the period of the shared server, NeoExtreme was broadcasting American music. KAF, in contrast, was playing anime and Japanese music. Some members from KAF expressed dislike for the American music and some were fond of it. Members of NeoExtreme were very vocal against KAF's anime music section, and uproar developed on their forum. The owner of NeoExtreme, and a friend of sk89q, was able to explain to his own members the special circumstances that the deal was placed under. The disagreement was solved, and everyone waited until the individual servers for each site were available.
When everything was ready, the radio for KAF was granted its own dedicated stream. At first it was played using a playlist system by sk89q. Occasionally sk89q and guinea812 would DJ, with guinea812 doing it most often. guinea812 was often the individual that would take requests, most via the thread announcing the availability of the radio. sk89q set up a complex automation system that supported time blocks, programs, and a variety of other features. It ran a while during the DJ-less gap periods.
Very unfortunately, the end of this incarnation was fast coming to an end. After having sk89q stream the music for a few days and nights using the automation system, his whole hard drive crashed. Although all the files were not technically lost, the drive was then unusable. sk89q could no longer stream. The job was then given to guinea812 to run his own playlist. He went away for a short period of time and left his radio streaming system running utilizing a random playlist. Funnily enough, when the automation software he was using ran out of songs, it tapped into the rest of his music collection. For example, Britney Spears could be heard on the KAF radio once in a while. Within three days of sk89q's hard drive death though, guinea812's hard drive had the same fate. It was gone. The radio was dead. No one was on hand to stream it, and a lot was lost.
It was figured that the Californian heat had gotten the hard drives. With it constantly reading and writing all night and day, it would have generated its own significant heat. Coupled with the high temperatures from the weather, it was enough for the hard drives to fail, or as so suspected. sk89q's hard drive, after poking around in it a bit in attempts to fix it, it was found that the file allocation table was completely corrupted, and it, safely assumable, was overwritten by the fixing software. Many of the files were also ruined.
sk89q was able to temporarily visit KAF and perform his computer work by installing a copy of Mandrake Linux onto a eight gigabyte Western Digital hard drive dated from years ago until he was able to buy a new hard disk. He was able to try guinea812's streaming until its unfortunate demise.
This incarnation had a very unexpected and regrettable death.
The agreement that left KAF with a radio server came from the radio hosting company TheOhioDealer. A website was created by sk89q in conjunction with NeoExtreme's owner, extremer in exchange for a server for a full year at any bitrate. After the crash, access to the Shoutcast server was freely given away to member NeoTym12 for his own occasional uses. TheOhioDealer became an untrustworthy party and the server did not last a full year, and their website was also besmirched from the original with the addition of garish ads. It was not of concern though; it would not matter in a later incarnation.
The server was at IP address 66.235.209.21 on port 9024. The server password was mony345.
On 20 February 2006, about half a year later, there was another incarnation of the KAF radio. To avoid imitating the hard-drive-death incident and to reduce the work, an ad-hoc server was created. It did not utilize a real radio server.
The system worked using a regular PHP programming script that would dump the whole music file to the user's player. It was timed using an external queue script that would have all the listening threads synced usually within thirty seconds apart. Because this system was quite radical, it did not work in all players. It had been tested to work in Winamp, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and VLC, but not Media Player Classic. Other players were not tested. All the music, streaming, and automation was done on KAF's server, something built to run 24/7 off a hard drive.
The death date of this radio is unknown.
On 4 May, 2006, it was attempted again. It used the same system as the second incarnation. Because KAF had access to two servers this time around though, the radio was moved to the secondary one to lighten load off the server. The same songs from the second incarnation were available in the third one. To assist in adding more songs, sk89q built an automated track encoding and uploading system during this incarnation. It was vastly quicker than individually naming the files, re-encoding them, and then uploading them by hand. guinea812 helped in this uploading effort.
This incarnation died because it was shut down to make room for the fourth incarnation. Death date was between 7 May 2006 and 11 May 2006.
Before the fourth incarnation came around, splitting the ad-hoc stream was considered, but this idea was dropped.
The third incarnation was closed down to try this one. The web-push ad-hoc system, although worked for the majority, had no real ability to host programs and surely couldn't allow DJs. sk89q wanted to use a server. The original server lacked a lot of customization and features, and it also had an intro advertisement. It was then decided to install KAF's own Shoutcast radio server since bandwidth and space was freely available, especially on the secondary server.
To avoid the hard-drive-death incident repeating itself, it was decided the server would do all the automation, with human DJs streaming only occasionally. Ideas were bounced around for the technical aspect of this challenge. It was found out that it was not an easy task, and there were no actual existing automation software packages that met all the requirements. Icecast was considered a few times instead of Shoutcast too.
Decoding the music at a playable rate was the dilemma. sk89q couldn't get it working perfectly, and he also couldn't find a command line program that would do it. Other ideas were tried, including "abusing" some other automation programs. An initial relatively working trial caused the music to play very fast and in a very high pitch. It was interesting, but the data did not come out fast enough so it would start skipping after a while.
The research was too large of a burden and this incarnation was killed in about a week. There was no more radio, at least for the moment.
The fourth incarnation never went public.
The original ad-hoc system was restored 4 August 2006, a little less than a year after the original start of the KAF radio.
It still is currently running.
The original ad-hoc system was restored 4 August 2006, a little less than a year after the original start of the KAF radio.
KAF Radio was brought back on 4 August 2007, and it ran Icecast2 on the same server with the website. A team of staff was created to stream on the radio station. In off-broadcast times, a playlist would be run through.
To this day, this system is still in operation, but the server is down for very long periods of time occasionally.
Last updated 22:21, 13, May 2008.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 United States License.