“Hello, my name is Eddy Smythe and I have this idea”
And so started three months of work, learning and ultimately, enjoyment.
Eddy had rung the studios at Red Kite Radio and fortunately the phone had been picked up by the studio manager. Eddy explained that he wanted to hold a socially distanced music festival in aid of the NHS Charities, with all of the audience in their cars and them being able to hear the music on the radios in their cars. He asked if Red Kite could do it.
“Yes of course we can, sounds like fun. Let me know when you have all the permissions you need, and we’ll broadcast it for you”
Putting down the phone I then began to panic. How on earth do you live stream a full afternoon, ensuring that it will sound in synch with what is happening on stage, especially when you don’t have the kit suitable for doing it.
It was something we had never done before – we had looked at the kit to be able to do it but decided that the £8000 it would take to do it was too expensive for us to contemplate.
Eddy rang with an update on his plans telling us that it was taking him longer than expected to get the permissions. “No problem Eddy, we’ll be ready whenever you want to go” – this actually meant “thank goodness – I still have no idea how I am going to pull this off.”
But we did. We found some software which would allow us to grab the music from the back of the sound crew’s mixer and pump it through a laptop. It would then travel across the internet to the studio where it would be channelled through our mixing desk and then be broadcast out on Red Kite Radio – only half a second later than it was
Dan Blaze agreed to act as MC for the day in Chinnor and Peter Dawes controlled the desk in Haddenham to ensure that whilst nothing was happening in Chinnor, we were still broadcasting music, sport and news from Haddenham.