I had a bit of a duh/ahah! moment this evening. We’ve been messing around with Nicecast to broadcast audio from Skype and iTunes, and it hit me that it would be able to pick up sound from GarageBand just fine, too. Broadcasting live guitar jams over Radio DS106.

I plugged my guitar into my amp, and connected the headphone jack from the amp to the line-in on my MacBook Pro. I plugged my headphones into the headphone jack on the computer, so I could hear as I “played.”

Then, I fired up GarageBand and set up a new Acoustic Instrument project. Turned on “Monitor Input (no feedback protection)” for the track. Fired up Nicecast and set it to broadcast to Radio DS106. Selected GarageBand as the source app. Jammed away. Easy. (aside from the lack of skill or talent – the technical part of the setup worked well at least).

I picked a time when there was nobody tuned into the station (how often does THAT happen) but it seemed to work just fine.

I bet it’d be possible to do modify this to feed audio from a bunch of guitars (or other sources) through Skype or iChat on a conference call (assuming the latency isn’t too high) and from there out to Radio DS106, for a live performance or jam session…

Update: Of course, I could have done this more simply by just selecting the line-in as audio source in Nicecast, rather than routing through GarageBand. But I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear if I did that directly. I’ll have to try that. Another duh/ahah! moment…

Update 2: yup. works just fine selecting Line In as audio source in Nicecast. The audio from the guitar gets pumped out to the headphones just fine, without having to go through GarageBand. Nice. I think I just scared off the 3 listeners that were on the station just now, to test this out… (sorry!)