Possible to broadcast private radio on vb?

[soletrader]

I want an option to broadcast live radio (not 3rd party stations) for my users. Is the podcast option in 3.6 provide this? Or is this something completely different? Thank you

[Floris]

If you attach the mp3 file to a thread they can use it through external php's podcast option.

[feldon23]

I don't think live radio and podcast are the same thing.

If you want to broadcast live streaming audio, install Shoutcast on your server. You should grab a calculator and consider how much bandwidth you will use per month. It's very easy to get out-of-hand. Where the heck is Internet 2 (one packet, multi-destinations means I could serve 1,000 listeners on an ISDN line!!)?

[soletrader]

Floris... this would be streaming audio?

Also feldon.... does shoutcast allow you to broadcast your own radio?

[feldon23]

The whole purpose of Shoutcast is to take a sound source of some kind and allow one or more listeners on the Internet to listen to it. In other words online radio. It replaced the ridiculously expensive RealAudio server system which mostly yielded halting bursts of static, with free, bandwidth-efficient, great-sounding audio that anyone could broadcast with a copy of Winamp.

Shoutcast will celebrate it's 8th birthday next January.

[soletrader]

Thank you for the info feldon. this may become an addition to my website.

[feldon23]

Grab a calculator and see if your web hosting plan will cover the usage. The amount of bandwidth even with a few listeners is breathtaking when taken over a month.

16 listeners at 64kbps (decent quality, about what XM uses on the dance channels), 16 hours a day for 30 days (1 month) is:

16 * ( 64 / 8 ) * 60 * 60 * 16 * 30 = 221,184,000 KB/month

221,184,000 KB/ 1024 / 1024 = 210.9 GB/month

Things get really expensive if you broadcast music that you haven't payed the royalties to play! Even if you are doing this for free or as a hobby, the music companies still expect you to pay for the "privilege" of letting someone else listen in. I think they'd charge us for loaning someone our iPod and headphones if they could.

[soletrader]

Okay I have a question regarding shoutcast. Is it possible for users on a website to tune into shoutcast of a third party radio station? Im having some problems understanding obtainin the ip address and server port of the radio stations.

[feldon23]

The server runs on an IP address and port. Listeners open Winamp, press Ctrl-L to open a location, and type in http://ipaddressort.

The tricky part is the server admin.

Most people don't have enough bandwidth on their home connection (DSL is especially slow on uploads in most cases and can often only support 4-6 listeners), so they relay their music up to their web server and then listeners can connect to that. You are broadcasting one stream from your PC to the server (28kbps for poor quality, 56kbps for better, 64kbps for good, 96kbps for very nice, 128kbps for near-CD) and then the server provides as many listeners as you want to allow/can afford.

So you install Shoutcast relay into Winamp, set it all up to broadcast, then you install the appropriate Shoutcast binary for your web server and configure it to use an unused port. Then you get the configuration of the two Shoutcasts to talk to each other. I don't remember which direction the connection is opened. Either your PC connects to the server, or the server connects to your PC as a listener. I remember it being a little more confusing than it should have been.

[soletrader]

Thank you for your information. Unfortunately I could not understand a single sentence. I will visit the website and learn about this a little more before I implement this into my site.

Ideally, I want users to be able to select radio stations directly from my website without visitin shoutcast.com. I am assuming this can be possible?

[feldon23]

I'm confused.

In your first post, you said "I want an option to broadcast live radio (not 3rd party stations) for my users."
Then you say you "want users to be able to select radio stations directly from my website without visitin shoutcast.com".

Are you going to run your own radio station (running more than 1 station is tricky, to say the least) or are you going to just list other people's radio stations on your website?

To set up your own radio station, either you need a very fast internet connection at home, or you will need some basic Linux knowledge to install the Shoutcast server on your website and relay the music from your PC up to your website so people can listen.

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