Welcome to Second Shifters

There are a lot of websites out there, a lot of things in life in general that offer no protection to anyone. Hatred flies free and is hidden under the guise of free speech. No protection is offered to those of us who are different, who don't fit the mainstream mold of what is expected.

Some of those people wish to find a haven, where they are free to discuss the things that are still not talked about in public. Freedom's that we all take for granted, and others try to take from us. Our rights as human beings to be the people we are without being afraid that we will be persecuted for it. We realize that there are minors who may listen to us, and people with sensitive beliefs and different ways of life: while we protect our right to free speech, we temper it with our beliefs in humanity. The first of which we consider to be: Do whatever you want to do, just don't hurt someone else by it.

We do not endorse any life choices: we endorse your right to make them, and be safe when you do so. We embrace all religions, all lifestyles, and all choices that are brought forth that will benefit mankind; and our need to learn more about ourselves and others. If you were to categorize the station, and it's cause: You would find the word humanity in capitol letters often. We are here for the enjoyment of everyone, our site, or forums, our station itself.

Just remember, in the battle of 'free-speech'... your right to it ends when it begins to hurt another person. Please, do not abuse our DJ's or our Forums with hatred or abuse, and we will watch over all of you, making sure that this is your place to be free and explore yourselves and the world within our pages, safely. As always, let the music play, and the soul fly free...

Radio that bites... Hard

With a whole world of radio stations out there that are trying to set themselves apart from everyone else, it seems that the music they play isn't so much different from what you'd hear on any other station. From one station to the next it seems to be the same artists debuting at the same time with the same albums and the same songs. The timing of it all is like clockwork, with an effect so strong that it is very difficult to find a station that is playing something that is really new and really unique.

Second Shifters is a station that is not quite like most of the other stations out there. We aren't the type of radio station that only plays the artists big enough to promote their music everywhere in the world. We seek out our own music to find what appeals to the darker side of us, and we play what we like instead of what all the mainstream charts tell us we should play.

Our range goes from lesser known artists, such as Merry Widow, Epsilon- Zero, and Sister Sacrilege, to the darker names you've already heard and loved. Every day our playlist is growing and we're always willing to consider requests.

Behind The Scenes

Since our very first air date of June 13th (Friday the 13th) of 2003, we've had people messaging and asking us just how it is that we manage to run our station, and while we've always given a broad overview to curious people, we've never really gone into great depth about just what we do, because there is so much too it.  But, since we know from your messages that many of you like getting into those technical details, here goes...

The Second Shifters radio stream runs on its own dedicated Xeon 2.4GHz server, courtesy of Slackhost, with 2 GB of DDR RAM, and a 1600 Gigabyte per month transfer limit (that's not a typo).  If the power goes out where the server is housed at, a battery backup will ensure that the stream doesn't miss a beat, and in the event that the power stays out for longer than the battery is capable of, a backup diesel generator will kick on to make sure that you can stay listening.

On the streaming side of things, Second Shifters runs off a Shoutcast based audio server, with some special modifications to keep things interesting.  The live DJs link up to the server, sending out at 64kbps in mp3pro format.  From there, the server listens to the main stream and sends it back out at 24kbps and 40kbps for our regular listeners to listen to, and leaves the original higher quality stream for our Gold Members to listen to.  For our remote DJs, they link up directly to the server so that they can make their playlists from what is stored on our server, without actually having the music stored on their computers.  They then add in live voice recordings of themselves to talk to you while they're on air.

If you're wondering just how many CDs we have to have to keep a good variety of darker music on the station, there's enough CDs here in the main office to fill an entire wall full of book cases, and we're always buying more CDs out of pocket to keep things new and fresh.

In addition to all this, we then have to pay our royalty fees in order for the station to stay legal and on air.  When you broadcast on an AM/FM station, you generally only have to pay a percentage of your profit as royalty rates to ASCAP and BMI to keep yourself out of trouble.  However, if you plan to reach a larger audience of people and broadcast on the internet, you have to pay additional fees for every single song that you play and for every single listener that hears that song to the RIAA.  Rather than pay all these separately, we use a service called swcast, that groups them together into a monthly fee.

After all is said and done, we end up paying at least $400 U.S. every month to keep things running as smoothly as they do, but we love doing it, and we're glad to have so many that love to listen.