Hi there! It's Jonathan here and in a special show later today at 2 PM Eastern, 7 PM UK, I’ll be broadcasting live on Mushroom FM for an hour doing a full music show live from my iPhone thanks to the Backpack Studio app.
Just over a year ago, I completed 20 years of live Internet broadcasting. Later this year, we’ll be celebrating the 10th birthday of Mushroom FM. Those sorts of anniversaries cause you to get a bit reflective. One of the things I’ve enjoyed very much during the last 20 years is trying new things, pushing technology’s boundaries and then teaching others what I’ve learned.
The first time I ever heard someone do a music show from their iPhone was in around 2012 or 2013, when Drew Webber, who was one of our fun guys then, did a short stint from his iPhone with a range of plug-ins chained together. The set-up wasn’t for the faint of heart. With a number of apps talking to a tool called AudioBus, it was easy for things to go wrong with the chain. But he did it on Mushroom FM all those years ago.
I’ve done one or two special programmes on Mushroom FM from my iPhone, the last of which was in 2017 when we broadcast live from the parade celebrating New Zealand’s winning of the America’s Cup. But that was with an app that just allowed you to stream whatever came from your microphone.
Last year, an app called Backpack Studio quietly changed the game. Backpack Studio is primarily designed for podcasting. If you produce spoken word content I highly recommend checking it out. Its developer is doing innovative things and it’s accessible to a level seldom seen in mainstream apps.
Backpack Studio has added support for a range of streaming servers as an in-app purchase, and today’s iPhones are able to stream the app’s output without breaking a sweat. The app’s primary use case is spoken-word content, but I believe with a little bit of ingenuity it’s possible to do the kind of show I known for on The Mosen Explosion.
I guess we’ll see, because today at 2 PM Eastern, 7 PM in the UK, I’ll be live on Mushroom FM streaming from the Backpack Studio app on my iPhone. My goal here is to use nothing but what Backpack Studio offers in terms of software, and what’s built right into the iPhone in terms of hardware. I’m not resorting to any of the external microphones I have that are iPhone compatible. I want to see how practical and easy it would be to simply take an iPhone out of your pocket and do a radio show with nothing else, from anywhere you have even a 3G connection. Yes, 3G is sufficient to get this done.
If the show is a success, I’ll put a podcast together that discusses the techniques involved in detail. I’ll be checking email and Twitter if you’d like to say hi, and yes, I’ll be doing that from my iPhone too.
Mushroom FM is available on the web at http://MushroomFM.com, in all the good radio apps, and by asking your clever little smart speaker to play Mushroom FM on TuneIn.