Public Internet Radio Client for Accessing Free Audio Maps in Countries with Free Speech
GNOME Internet Radio Locator (2.0.4)
This dissertation fullfills the requirements of the Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering at Oslo Metropolitan University, in coordination with the status of the Bachelor of Science program at Oslo Metropolitan University, Faculty of Technology, Art and Design, Norway.
The notion of public radio was first expressed and explained by Edwin Howard Armstrong at the basement of Columbia's Philosophy Hall.
Radio was the first wireless medium for transmitting audio and speech to the audience in a remote hall.
The Internet was invented by ARPA in 1969.
This thesis describes the work of mapping Free Radio Stations broadcasting around the world on a graphical map on a computer with display based on the graphical user interface toolkit GTK+ and audio streaming over a computer network between at least two computer systems that is capable of converting digital bits with audio waves and silence into audio waves in a audio headset or audio amplification system known as High Fidelity with stereo or mono loudspeakers.
The work on the software GNOME Internet Radio Locator began in 2002, halted for 12 years and recontinued in 2014.
A major rewrite for GNOME 3 began in 2017 and a minor rewrite for GTK+ 4 began in 2018.
The work on this dissertation began in September 15, 2018 and describes this work.
The work will be completed on June 30, 2020 and published online.
Audio waves are compressed and decompressed air between the amplitude device and human ears.
This field is described in biology and is not a subject in electrical engineering.
In electrical engineering an audio receptor is a microphone, while an audio transmitter is a loudspeaker or a headset.
The speed of sound in hot air is about 115 meters/second.
The sound wave falls to 0 dB after the initial signal-to-air curve.
Thomas Alva Edison produced the initial audio wave recording on tin foil in 1878.
Electrical fields are based and formed when a wire is ignited with power from a power generator such as a dynamo, turbin generator or chemical fluid in a battery such as 9 Volt batteries from Duracell, Energizer or VARTA.
The duration of the electrical field is determined by the flow of electrical current and the flow of electrons from negative to positive charge measured in Coloumb.
An electrical system consists of a wire, a circuit, a power source and a capacitor.
A computer system is a machine for computing numbers, producing printed papers, transmitting data between another computing system, visualizing graphics such as a map on a display system as described in chapter 13 ("Graphical Display Interfaces") and resonating audio.
Computers operate with temporary storage and solid-state storage.
In this thesis the storage is temporary and the data is a stream of audio between two computers and a stream of map data as tiles. See chapter 16 on "Mapping Systems".
Computers can store its physical location with GPS. The logical components read a stream of audio from the position of the GPS antenna and displays the public broadcasts nearby.
The saturation will bring resonnance to the public spot and give a good recording of audio from all angels and balcony spots.
The playback of the audio recording will be very precise.
I propose MLAR, a format for multiple-location audio recording (MLAR). MLAR, built on software from Xiph.org, will enable recording from multiple device audio for playback and entertainment, with radio locator and absolute precision (~ 10 meters).
A network system consists of three or more digital computer systems (see chapter 4 on "Computer systems") that can connect between separated physical space and fields (see chapter 3 on "Electrical systems").
Network adressing in IP is based on Internet Protocol adressing of computer network adressing (physical and logical link).
The Internet was built upon the Internet Protocol described in RFC 781 (1981) and RFC 8098 (2017), documents known as "Request for Comments".
The first Internet domain was symbolics.com introduced in 1985.
The rationale behind Internet domains under .com were commercial, not in the public benefit like .org domains.
When computers were set up in networks, the Internet Protocol addresses were at first static and stored in /etc/hosts on Unix. At some point ICANN, ISC and IETF decided that the DNS configuration should be hierarchical.
Today we have a system where domain names expire 1 year after the registration date which promotes the free market dynamics, but does not solve a technical problem, because the domains stop working when the network operators don't receive the annual yearly fee for the domain from the domain registrant and competes against registrars.
The root servers on different Internet servers are hierarchical.
There are indications that domains should be dynamically configured, maintained and stored forever. There should be a public archive of domain name system records with historical records.
Audio was previously recorded for the first time by Thomas Alva Edison on tin foil in 1878.
Marconi invented long-distance transatlantic radio in 1901 and received the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work in 1909 with Karl Ferdinand Braun.
The gramophone industry was built on recorded music, for private listeners, public spots and playback on radio.
A public gramophone player, the jukebox, brought music to the public and private rooms.
Radio kept playing songs on request and some still do.
When the jukebox and audio amplification systems in homes became popular, radio still survived, even with the introduction of streaming audio systems in the early 2000 after the introduction of audio codecs with good compression. See chapter 11 on audio codecs.
The supported audio codecs in GNOME Internet Radio Locator are based on the implementation of codecs in GStreamer such as MPEG, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and Advanced Audio Codec (AAC).
MLAR, proposed in chapter 5 on computer storage, will store recorded audio in locations, at historical moments and scale rooms from different view points.
MLAR stands for Multi-Location Audio Recording.
The response of audio is vital in any audio system. Radio broadcasts important messages that sometimes are location-sensitive to the public and it is crucial in saving lives with distance between the signal and location.
The distance for audio broadcasted on radio is typical limited by the power of the radio transmit in FM.
With radio broadcasted over the Internet, the distance is unlimited.
The X Window System revolutionized the computing industry when it was introduced at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in 1984.
GTK+, the GNU Image Manipulation Toolkit, announced at UC Berkeley in 1996, was the first free, LGPL widget toolkit for the X Window System and it made it possible to write Free Software programs with good graphical appearance for the X Window System in networks.
The GNOME project, a free desktop for the X Window System built on the GTK+ library, was announced in 1997 at UNAM in Mexico City.
The work on GNOME Internet Radio Locator began in 2002 at Norwegian Computing Center and continued after a visit to M.I.T. in Cambridge, MA in June 2014 as I became aware of OpenStreetMap, libchamplain and GNOME Maps.
The 2.0 release was announced on gnome-announce-list@gnome.org and published on https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-internet-radio-locator/
Work on the GNOME 3 application began in 2017 and work on the GTK+ 4 application began in 2018.
The introduction of the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds at University of Helsinki, after the delay of the GNU Hurd microkernel, written from scratch in machine assembler and published under the GNU General Public License, marked the next technical revolution in home computing and eventually saved the society from huge costs as server operating system.
With Linux it was finally possible to install Free Unix on a personal computer.
Alan Cox wrote large parts of the networking code and sound code at University of Wales Swansea in the early 1990s.
The rise of Linux in the late 1990s with the GTK+ and GNOME projects made people aware of the importance of free licenses and the consequences of bad licensing. The Open Source Initiative was launched in 1998 and it was crucial in the public release of the Mozilla Web Browser source code from Netscape, Inc.
Some supporters of Open Source were critical of the GNU General Public License. The next generation of the Library GPL was dubbed Lesser General Public License. Free Software developers kept working on GTK+, GIMP and GNOME and freedesktop.org.
Around 2004 the community began work on free geographical maps in the OpenStreetMap.org project. The project produces free maps of geographical sites, buildings and roads in a crowd-sourced project dubbed OSM. In 2013 the GNOME project released GNOME Maps. In 2017 support for OpenStreetMap in GNOME Internet Radio Locator as well as support for libchamplain and gst-player was implemented. In 2018 the work on the GTK+ 4.0 port began as gtk-internet-radio-locator that is published in https://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk-internet-radio-locator/
In 2017 libinput, a Free Software project to build graphical user interface cursors and device input systems for Wayland, the replacement display system after The X Window system, was presented at GUADEC 2017 (see chapter 13: Graphical Display Interfaces).
It provides input support for mice, trackballs, and touch pads.
Work on documenting GNOME Internet Radio Locator began at GUADEC 2017 at Manchester Metropolitan University in July 2017.
In 2001 Norwegian Computing Center built a full audio recording studio in the Kristen Nygaard Building in Forskningsparken and organized 01lab, a conference and meeting place for scientists and artists. A full studio was designed and built by Benum.
In 2002 I began work on a XML DTD and the GNOME Internet Radio Locator program to stream audio from a FM radio connected to the Internet in the studio of Radio NOVA, Radio Tellus and radiOrakel to the GNOME desktop.
The GNOME software that finalizes the ideas explained in this thesis is available from https://www.gnome.org/~ole/gnome-internet-radio-locator and download.gnome.org.
In May 2018 the work on the GTK+ 4.0 port began as gtk-internet-radio-locator that is published in https://download.gnome.org/sources/gtk-internet-radio-locator/
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