On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 2:10 AM, Dan Egli <[email protected]> wrote: > One of the guys I see here on a daily basis has expressed an interest in > starting his own internet radio station. I think it's a cool idea, but > while I can give him pointers on his basic hardware and such, I wouldn't > know where to begin on recommending any hardware or software for the actual > radio stuff. I know he'd need a microphone, but beyond that, I'm not sure. > If he's playing any music (assuming he has the licenses from the record > companies to play their music) I can recommend he store his music on the > computer in MP3 format or something, but is that the best way? And what > software would you recommend to actually broadcast the audio data to anyone > who is interested? Is there anything else he'd need? I've already helped > him design on paper a small but effective Linux router, and for that we > basically just used a small AMD APU based box (I think he's got an A8 APU > in it, but I don't think that really matters much) with Linux and iptables. > But is there any other special configuration needed besides forwarding the > correct ports via iptables and enabling ip forwarding via the /proc file > system (/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward if memory serves)?
I've done jukebox-style music broadcasting over the network with the combination of mpd and icecast. Mpd takes care of the playlist management and audio track decoding and pipes the output to icecast, which runs as a listening service and broadcasts it (an ogg or mp3 stream) to anyone that points their browser or media player to that address. That's a really simple solution. If he wants to run a full-on radio station with scheduled programs, etc., Airtime might be a better fit. I haven't used Airtime, but it's been spoken of pretty highly by (and is used by, I think) Jupiter Broadcasting, who does mostly tech/Linux-related podcasts. I don't think that either of these solutions require very beefy hardware, and they're both free (as in beer and freedom). I know that mpd can deal with lots of audio file formats (mp3, ogg, flac, wav, etc.), and I'd imagine that Airtime will too, so it shouldn't really matter what format it's stored in. Hardware-wise, a decent vocal microphone and small USB/Firewire-attached mixing board should be the only thing he needs, outside of a PC. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
