Best Methods For Broadcasting Live Audio On The Web
from the ask-Techdirt? dept
We don’t normally do “Ask Techdirt” type posts, but this is a good question, and Jeremiah Jacobs has been doing very interesting things with online music, which we like to encourage (and has been an active, thoughtful commenter on Techdirt). So, if anyone has some good thoughts, feel free to note them in the comments. Jeremiah writes “Dear Techdirt: What’s the best means for “broadcasting” audio via the web? I’m aware of things like Shoutcast, and it’s ilk, but I’m in need of something I can use to create a 128k or higher mp3 stream in realtime. The overall concept is that I want to put on sessions where surfers can listen in @ near-CD quality while I compose/mix/screw-off in my studio, with a live audio feed right from my mixing station. The idea being to give people some insight (directly) into the creative process, as they can listen in on actual creative/production sessions. Later on, I want to couple this with a webcam feed, too. I am capable of implementing suggestions in both M$ and Linux environments. Thanks for your suggestions.”
Comments on “Best Methods For Broadcasting Live Audio On The Web”
I've only heard about this...
I’ve never tried it.
http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Mar/bma20030404019454.htm
No Subject Given
maybe http://www.videolan.org would help. It works with all kind of mpegs, so probably also mp3. The multicasting server is free and the free player is widely used.
Haven t tested it myself, I’d do it if i was good setting up servers, which I am not. If you test it, please, let me know how it goes.
It isn t really streaming, but the result is that.
Not difficult...
It’s actually not all that difficult, if you can live with a couple of second delay. True realtime would be difficult.
Basically what you do is re-direct your sound card input to an MP3 encoder. You can do this using Unix pipes and you could probably do the whole thing in shell script. It would run with some lag compared to what you are mixing, but with a fast box, it would not be too bad. You might checkout the slimp3 software to see if they are doing some stream munging.
You can do the same thing under Windows, a friend of mine uses pipes to re-direct the player->soundcard stream so he can rip mp3’s from protected files (to play on a portable player…). I don’t know the semantics of doing that, ‘tho.
No Subject Given
Apples quicktime on Darwin. Not necessarily a M$ or Linux solution but does run on an Intel box so should be close enough. Price (FREE) is also sweet.
And for a apple plug, it runs like a fine wine on a X server. Still a fairly inexpensive solution compared at least to the M$ world.
Too bad you want a GNU/Linux solution.
Because on FreeBSD:
cd /usr/ports
$ grep streaming INDEX | grep audio | awk -F| ‘{print $1 ” ” $2 ” ” $4 }’
gnump3d-2.6 /usr/ports/audio/gnump3d A streaming server for MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and other streamable audio files
icecast-1.3.12_1 /usr/ports/audio/icecast A streaming mp3 audio server
icecast2-2.0.a.2.20030811_1,1 /usr/ports/audio/icecast2 A streaming mp3/ogg-vorbis audio server
ices-2.0.b.2.20030811,1 /usr/ports/audio/ices A streaming source client for icecast 2
p5-Shout-1.0 /usr/ports/audio/p5-Shout Perl glue for libshout MP3 streaming source library
xmms-liveice-1.0.0 /usr/ports/audio/xmms-liveice Use XMMS for streaming audio to Icecast servers
ffmpeg-0.4.8 /usr/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg Hyper fast realtime audio/video encoder/converter, streaming server
ffmpeg-0.4.5_6 /usr/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg045 Hyper fast realtime audio/video encoder/converter, streaming server
asfrecorder-1.1.20010307 /usr/ports/net/asfrecorder Tool for downloading streaming media from the Internet
mod_mp3-0.40 /usr/ports/www/mod_mp3 Apache module to allow MP3 streaming
p5-Apache-MP3-3.05 /usr/ports/www/p5-Apache-MP3 MP3 browsing and streaming under mod_perl and Apache
$ grep streaming INDEX | grep -i apple
DarwinStreamingServer-4.1.3g|/usr/ports/net/DarwinStreamingServer|/usr/local|Darwin Streaming Server, a MP3, MPEG4 and QuickTime streaming server
On FreeBSD you’d CD into say
/usr/ports/net/DarwinStreamingServer
and type in make. Then make install and you’d be up and running.
Shoutcast
I’ve always found Shoutcast via a SHOUTcast DSP to work well. I used to
listen to Tag’s Trance, and they ran live shows all the time with 1000+
listeners (the DJ would be talking and mixing on-line, live, even taking
requests and such). And of course I recommend
StationRipper for those
wanting record what the Shoutcast station? is playing :)?
?
Re: Shoutcast
hey! anyone know any tricks to lessen delay time in Shoutcast? I really need to broadcast at 128kbps and am getting a 15-20 second delay. We’re on a T1, it seems like it might be the software itself. I’m trying to find something that has less than 5 seconds delay.
Thanks!
Ryan
ryan@sunspotsproductions.com
Re: Re: Shoutcast
It won’t have much delay (1-2 secs) if the player is listening all the time and the server is turned on later.
I guess it has delay because the player is reading from the previous buffer.