Alright, let me tell you about this little project I tinkered with, something I ended up calling ‘televised radio’. It wasn’t for any big company or anything, just a personal experiment I ran in my spare time because the idea popped into my head and wouldn’t leave.
Getting Started
So, the whole thing started with a simple thought: radio is great, but it’s just sound. What if you could add a visual element without turning it into full-blown television? Something simple, maybe abstract, to accompany the audio. I decided to give it a whirl.
First step was gathering the basic tools. I didn’t buy anything special initially. Just used what I had:
- An old-ish laptop that could handle some basic processing.
- My trusty USB microphone for decent audio input.
- The laptop’s built-in webcam, just to have some video source to start with.
The goal wasn’t high production value, just to see if the concept worked at a fundamental level.
Putting it Together
I needed software to mix the audio and video. I’d heard good things about OBS Studio, especially since it’s free and pretty powerful, so I downloaded and installed that. Took me a bit to figure out the interface, lots of buttons and menus.
My first attempt was super basic. I configured OBS to capture audio from my USB microphone. Then I added the webcam feed as a video source. So essentially, it was just me talking on camera. Like a video call, really. That wasn’t quite the ‘televised radio’ vibe I was after. The focus should be the audio, with visuals as backup.
So, I changed tack. I thought, maybe the visuals shouldn’t be a person talking. What about something that reacts to the sound? I looked into audio visualizers. Found some plugins and built-in options within OBS that could generate patterns based on the audio input. That felt more like it!
Experimenting with sources was key. I tried a few things:
- My voice + Visualizer: I set up my mic as the audio source, disabled the webcam, and added a visualizer layer that pulsed and changed with my voice. Interesting, but maybe a bit weird for just talking.
- Music + Visualizer: Played some royalty-free music tracks through the system and let the visualizer run. This looked pretty cool, much like old media player visualizations, but live.
- Internet Radio + Visualizer: This felt closest to the original idea. I figured out how to capture the audio output from an internet radio stream playing on the laptop. Muted my mic input in OBS. Then I fed this radio audio into the visualizer. Now we were talking! Listening to an actual radio station, but with dynamic graphics on the screen reacting to the music or talk.
Hitting Snags
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course. Getting the audio routing right was tricky. Sometimes the software wouldn’t pick up the right sound source, or the levels would be all over the place. The visualizer plugins were sometimes buggy or just didn’t look very impressive. Finding stable internet radio streams that worked well and didn’t cut out was also a bit of a search.
There was a lot of trial and error involved. Clicking through settings, restarting the software, trying different audio inputs, tweaking visualizer parameters. It took patience.
The Outcome
In the end, I managed to get a decent little setup running. I could broadcast (just locally on my network, mostly) an audio stream – either my voice, music files, or an internet radio station – accompanied by real-time visuals generated from the audio. It wasn’t fancy, basically just OBS running on a laptop, but it proved the concept to myself. It was a fun way to explore how audio and visuals could be combined differently.
It definitely made me appreciate the simplicity of traditional radio, but also showed how easy it’s become to add simple visual layers to audio content if you want to. Learned a fair bit about audio routing and streaming software along the way, which is always a bonus.
