I wrote this program in Visual Basic 6. When installed on a PC this software has access to all my mp3 files, which I've categorized into stations on the dial. Access to the stations is via a moving "glass" pointer. Either you can click on a station name and the pointer moves to it, or you can drag the thumbnail - just above the (C) by my name left.
All the audio on it has been severely compressed and it sounds just like a medium/long wave radio. This has the side benefit that I can fit astonishing amounts of audio data on a DVD. A typical three-minute song takes up 220K (as opposed to about 50MB as a WAV). On this page I am showing the last version built in August 2003 - the DVD version. This DVD version could hold enough programme material to run for 15 days without repeating itself - given that anybody could be bothered to compress such a lot of data. A station never repeats itself untill it has played every tune (randomly) from its "pool". When it is closed down it saves its "play state" so it will not even repeat itself from one day to the next - until it has exhausted its pool. After that it starts again with a different random order.
Things to note when watching the Virtual Radio video. Each station has been made to work in real time, it should be apparent from the movie that if you tune away from a station and then tune back later, the sound is at the right place to give the impression that the station was playing whilst you were away - this is accurate. Note also that it can be tuned by clicking the station blob when the pointer will track to the blob and the station will play. It can also be tuned by dragging the thumbnail back and forth. In the latter mode it is possible to hear all the interference and foreign stations between the stations. There are some issues. Some of the station labels have been truncated, with each new version of Windows functions stop working, Windows 7 can't cope with the "time integrity" facility which, of course, is 90% of its radioness. The loud hiss on the movie is mostly from my Lumix LX3 camera's video microphone, try to imagine it with clean sounds. And, of course, Flash has mangled the picture quality.
