how-to online radio ?

http://www.live365.com/

http://pirateradio.com/

thanx mate, very useful :)

Hi !

I'm really interressted in broadcasting music for years now... I had my own radio but my dedicated server had a really bad hardware crash so now i'm offline until end of augustus, for the arrival of my new provider :)

There are four main technologies for broadcasting live sound on the internet

• Winamp / XMMS : Shoutcast : This is the most used technology, it's a constant "realtime encoded" MP3 stream... The best solution IMHO, i will discuss it here

• Real Player : Real : too proprietary and not simple to use, this technology is to forget because of the poor sound quality and the crappy real player

• Windows Media Player : WMA : This solution is good too, but you know microsoft, you maybe have to pay licence fees and so on, in fact i just used it as a passive listener, and it gives a good sound, nearly as good as shoutcast, but i think it's all a crap to get it up

• XMMS : IceCast : It's the same as shoutcast , but with OGG encoded stream, this technology is not yet used and it's difficult to get it work properly, and listeners have to install specific plugins in winamp and so on

Now, let's say we have chosen ShoutCast

At first you need a relay. This is the server where listeners connect. It means this server needs a high load of bandwidth ( internet connection upload speed ).

Let's say we stream at 128 kbps , stereo , as on Digitally Imported. this gives the music a perfect sound.

As the stream bitrate is 128 000 bits/sec , you have to divide it by 8 in order to get the number of bytes / sec ONE listener will occur on your connection.

It's exactly 16 000 bytes / sec . As quite 99% of the broadband belgian connection only upload between 12 and 14 Kbytes /sec , you can't broadcast live at 128 kbps or your listeners will notice that the songs skip or they simply get silence each second, esecially if they connect directly to your computer on your ADSL / cable connection, they will simply keep on buffering without hearing anything.

Solutions

1. decrease the bitrate. Please note that 56 kbits/sec is an acceptable sound quality, but under this it gets really "telephone" like. But even at 56 kbps, your adsl connection won't be able to handle more than 3 simultanate listeners

2. Find a relay, or install it on a huge professionnal connection, like in an university or a dedicated server with unlimited bandwidth ( quite rare, eh ;) ) So your PC will connect to the relay as sound source ( DJ mode as they say on shoutcast.com ) , will continously upload encoded stream, and the relay will duplicate it as many as necessary for each of the listeners, so if the relay bandwidth is sufficient, they won't notice skips or lags

3 ) Get a faster internet connection at home... If you can afford it ;)

Hardware / Software

1. Sound input: you or your mp3's

You simply have to run winamp with the shoutcast source plugin, so what passes through winamp will be encoded at the good bitrate and uploaded to the relay.

You can plug your home studio in your line-in input of your soundcard, then in shoutcsat source, last tab, settings, select Soundcard input instead of Winamp. So you can plug your mixtable, and do your show. I did, it works really fine.

So, what you need for this part is : a not-too-slow computer, winamp installed on it with Shoutcast source DSP plugin, and an internet connection able to upload correctly at the bitrate you selected

2 ) Relay : the shoutcast antenna

As i described before, this is a box ( typically a unix shell ;) ) with an insane internet connection able to handle and serve the configured number of listeners at the same time. You just have to install the shoutcast server for your box platform , configure it, and let it run

So, you need a relay box, and shoutcast server

3 ) listeners.

Ahah :) They simply have to run winamp, in the playlist window, ADD url : and they type http://www.yourrelay.com:8000/ for example, if your relay box is running on the port 8000 ( default ) of www.yourrelay.com . and they will hear you !

Link : http://www.shoutcast.com

If you have questions, don't hesitate :)

Cheers

FlashyJ

( and i win the longest post award yesss o/ )

icecast is the same thing as shoutcast btw :)

it's just an opensource shoutcast server, you CAN use ogg if you want, though by default it uses mp3 :)

icecast is much more flexible than shoutcast and is used on linux servers ...

hey thanks FlashyJ for the thorought explanation: it's cristal clear to me.

dunno how to find the bandwidth thou. will have to search for relays....

*-]

Originally posted by : ZARk

icecast is the same thing as shoutcast btw :)

it's just an opensource shoutcast server, you CAN use ogg if you want, though by default it uses mp3 :)

icecast is much more flexible than shoutcast and is used on linux servers ...

No, cause you have to use specail urls in order to mix, you have to provide a "stream name" or somthing like that, which one isn't in shoutcast source... And headers are really different... So no, i still believe that icecast != shoutcast

Originally posted by : djit

hello,

anyone knows or has a good resource on how to make its own internet radio? what does it take, hardware, software, etc...

thanx

*-]

contact the guys from http://www.eightball.be, i guess they can give u some info if u ask nice

i have my own show there every wednesday between 19.30 and 21