A lot of commercial radio stations churn out rubbish music and inane talk between the rubbish music and adverts.

For a really low bandwidth idea, you could mechanise this:

So you have a new device which combines:

1. A cheap MIDI-compatible soundcard (most are) 2. A speech synthesizer 3. A digital Radio reciever 4. Some custom stuff to convert 3 into something that 1. and 2. can understand.

The broadcaster streams out MIDI-information - instead of audio, and then a text stream for the announcer and adverts.

Would be really really low bandwidth. Probably.

Most classical music is freely available because the guys that wrote it are all dead, and (probably because of this) there's loads of classical MIDI stuff around; and a load of rubbish pop music is available as MIDI - due to popularity of ringtone downloads.
-- monojohnny, Jun 28 2006

Portable_20MIDI_20Player perfect complement for this [xaviergisz, Jun 28 2006]

barcode https://www.barcodesinc.com/index.htm
barcode for music industry [coke, Feb 14 2008]

Wikipedia on Muzak http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak
[CwP, Feb 15 2008]

Midi, however, is almost universally horrendous when vocals are involved. For some reason the would-be composer always chooses to replace the vocal line with panpipes. I want a campaign to set all panpipes in concrete.

For classical music though, fine. [+]
-- david_scothern, Jun 28 2006


how long could you listen to average general midi sounds before going crazy? [-]
-- webfishrune, Jun 28 2006


About as long as listening to a normal commercial radio station probably. :-)
-- monojohnny, Jun 28 2006


Perfect for your state-run radio station, which can easily create midi files of all four state-approved songs, and the news spots can be typed up months in advance.
-- lurch, Jun 29 2006


They did this for years in the US and overseas. It was called Muzak (see link) but I called it elevator music because that was the only place I could ever actually hear it. It was pricy background music that could kill you before you ascended to the second floor. Just kidding.

When I got my first Sony CD player and discovered a digital output on the back, I had the same idea. The port outputted the same digital data that was written on the CD including error correction information. I figured I could pipe it into another player but I never got around to trying it out.

They now do something similar to your idea by satellite for a monthly fee. Except you get “144 channels with nothing on…” unless you like to pay for Howard Stern.

Hmm, it also sounds like a MIDI/MP3 library on a FTP site. Add a streamer and you get another Internet station (one of hundreds) that be played by a free downloadable player. Pick a country or language.

But that’s being transmitted by cable. So, pipe that into a FM transmitter ($15+ US) and you have a real radio station. I transmit my mp3 player output to my car radio.

Many Internet stations do much as you suggest including artificial announcers and station identifications. They are so low budget they don’t care about advertisers and thus are more whimsical. One station’s artificial announcer claims its station has ‘more fat, fewer calories’ than other stations.

The transmitter still cost (be it radio, cable, or Internet) but the concept works. I give it a (+).
-- CwP, Feb 15 2008


Didn't understand it but sounds good to me. Croissant.
-- M Carter, Feb 15 2008


I seem to recall that the MPEG-4 standard includes both MIDI (data rate of 31.25 KHz) and text-to speech conversion. You'd need some overhead for error correction if it is to be broadcast.
-- csea, Feb 15 2008



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