Chill

Listening to Chill on internet radio

Here's a common conversation I've had with listeners...

Listener: "Hey I love Chill!"
Me: "Thanks very much, we love making it!"
Listener: "But I can't listen any more..."
Me: "oh... why not?"
Listener: "I used to listen on DAB, but now I've moved / come back from holiday / etc and you're not on in my area. Aaaagh!"
Me: "You know you can listen online at http://www.helpmechill.com/, right?"
Listener: "Yeah but I want it in my bedroom / in the kitchen / I don't want a big computer whirring away / my PC sounds rubbish / etc (x lots)"

If you're getting this, you might like to know about internet radios. I've been wanting to share this for a while, but I didn't know what to recommend until I got one and tried setting it up myself. If it wasn't easy to do, or if it didn't sound nice, I couldn't recommend it as a way to chill. Now thanks to a birthday pressie from my wife, I've been able to try this at home, and it's great news - it works, it's quite easy, and it sounds amazing!

All you need at home to set one up is a wireless router and an internet radio. You don't need your computer to listen to Chill!

What's a wireless router?

This is the box you use to get a wireless broadband ("wi-fi") connection. This is now standard with a lot of decent web packages, like BT's Total Broadband where you get a free "BT Home Hub". Looking online right now, it looks like all of Sky Broadband's packages come with a wireless router, and they are also offered by O2, Orange, and others. Here is a list of popular broadband packages. If you need to switch to get a good offer, I've found this pretty easy in the past.

I'm on Virgin Media's basic package, so I had to buy a wireless router. Just search for the words "wireless router" on your favourite shopping site. I have used this Belkin router for over a year now (it costs £35), but there are loads of alternatives.

Where does the router go, and what does it do?
Every broadband connection comes with a modem, where you can connect your computer directly. A router lives between your computer and the modem. It's like having a 4-plug mains adapter - the router lets you use one socket to connect several computers at once. The best bit is that a wireless router lets you do this... wirelessly - hooray!

That's the complicated bit. When that's done, connecting an internet radio and listening to Chill is simple.

Internet radios
These boxes simply connect wirelessly to your router, and play internet radio stations. Some will also play MP3s, or other music on your computers, or charge your iPod or whatever, but let's keep it simple...

I got this Pinnacle Soundbridge radio. I had to go here to download the latest software for it to connect to my router. That was the hardest bit, and I needed an SD memory card to get the software from my computer to the radio, but it only took about 3 minutes. Then it got online as soon as I popped in the password.

It came with a big list of preset stations, including "Chill - United Kingdom" - that's us! It took about five seconds to get a connection, then ran uninterrupted for hours. In a week of listening, I've only heard the stream interrupted once, and it took five seconds (and no fiddling required) for it to fix itself.

Best of all, the sound quality is amazing. I love my Pure Evoke 1 DAB radio, and didn't think I could find a small box with a better sound, but this does the job.

Is this better than DAB?
To be honest, I think DAB is still much easier to set up - if you're in an area where you get us, you can simply switch on the radio and there we are. DAB is also cheaper, with sets available from £15 now, with no other equipment needed.

Setting up this internet radio wasn't too hard because I already had a wireless router. It was annoying that, for me, it didn't work straight out of the box. You would have to be technically minded to go and get the latest software for it instinctively... but as long as you know about it, and you can put it on an SD card from your computer, it doesn't take long.

The best bit was enjoying the end result, which is a great sounding box which I can plug in anywhere at home, and remembers how to set itself up in seconds after the first time. This means I can (and do) listen in bed, in the kitchen and over dinner with friends, without lugging a computer around.

If that sounds good to you, and you can get a mate to help with any of the bits which prove hard in the setup, I can highly recommend the listening experience.

What if I get a different internet radio and it doesn't have Chill as a preset?
Most internet radios have some way of entering addresses for your favourite stations. Some have keys to do it, others (like mine) have their own web pages you can access from a computer on your network, and you enter one of these addresses for Chill:

http://mediaweb.musicradio.com/playlist.asx?streamid=55 or
http://mediasrv.musicradio.com/chill

Does it work for you?
I would love to hear about your experiences of listening on internet radio, as I know lots of people do now. What radio do you use, how easy was it to set up, and would you recommend it to Chill listeners? You can email chill@radiomail.co.uk or post a comment.

Cheers,
Bern

How did Chill start?

Several years ago, as DAB digital radio was starting, it became clear that new ideas were needed to make new digital radios worth having. I was asked to chip in suggestions, and thought about the kind of music friends and I would listen to on CDs because we could not hear it on the radio. Making compilations of chillout music has been one of my favourite hobbies for years, ever since I first had a tape recorder. I would spend hours making a mix for a friend for them to enjoy, and love getting more from other people. We hoarded these mixes and brought them out to play when friends came round, or when we just needed to chill on our own.

So I wondered how many other people did the same, or how many would just like to share our chillout mixes and enjoy relaxing with them. The suggestion went in to turn this idea into a radio station, and start to build up a big stack of tunes we enjoy chilling with. I made a demo late one night in my bedroom, burned five copies (four for my company, and one for my wife) and labelled them "chill - do not listen before midnight". It struck me afterwards that the words "do not listen" might not be the best pitch for a new radio station, but thankfully radio is full of eccentric people who don't like to do what they are told.

It turns out they did listen, and after several years of quiet campaigning and a few test surveys, GWR Group decided to give it a go. It hadn't been decided whether or not to make this a "proper" radio station, so the first brief was to pick a bunch of tunes to play over Christmas 2004 on a test channel in Bristol, on random shuffle. We didn't agree a name. Nobody knew who we were. The music played, and it sounded alright, we liked it, but we didn't love it. We came back from holiday and agreed that we needed to do better if we wanted people to enjoy chilling with us. The only problem was having virtually no money to do it.

So we came to a compromise, of sorts - the company would get me the tools I needed to do the music properly, and we would agree a name to identify the station, but we had no budget, no logo, no web site, and GWR didn't want to be identified with it. This was so simple, the only thing which could possibly be contentious was the name. So we ended up taking a month to decide between "Chiller" (to tie in with the company's existing chillout show, "Chiller Cabinet", established on the massive national station Classic FM) or the original idea from the "do not listen" home made demo, which only half a dozen people had ever seen. On 26 January 2005, "Chill" was born.

Usually radio stations will go out and spend a stack of money when they launch. You would see posters everywhere advertising "Ballsy and Perky's Breakfast Show" and competitions to win a car for guessing the secret sound. We had none of that. All we could do was put a message in the little scrolly text bar you get on digital radios, and we simply offered the chance to get in touch with an email address we had set up in our anonymous sounding webmail system, so people would not know the company connection. chill@radiomail.co.uk is the address we still use. I laughed and jumped up and down when we had the first email through - someone liked the station and wanted to know who we were. I replied. More came, asking what track we had played at such and such time, and whether we sold CDs, and with lots of nice words of encouragement. Keeping in touch with these listeners who had stumbled across Chill by accident was starting to keep me busy.

The station was growing by word of mouth, and in a London boardroom two friends started to get excited. Gregory Watson and Matt Deegan were in charge of what stations went where on our new digital transmitters, and they became champions of Chill.

Over the next year, listeners' emails started to flood in, along with ideas and requests for all sorts of things we could do to help people chill. Since then, we added a simple website which now draws over 20,000 listeners a week, and to get around our budget restrictions we based all our regular updates, blogs and playlists on social networks. We were the first UK station on Myspace. We're now on others like Facebook and Last.fm too, and nearly 200,000 people a week listen in total. Along the way, some really amazing DJs and producers joined in - people like Pete Lawrence, Ben Mynott, Bruce "Alucidnation" Bickerton, Paul "Deep End" Noble (who also runs the Big Chill festival radio station) and Ben "Chiller Cabinet" Eshmade, our company's original chiller.

Most importantly, we're still doing simply what we always wanted to do - get together with friends, swap mixes and enjoy chilling together.

Ways to help you chill

Pip n Jay church

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