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They have all kinds of streaming MP3. It plays in Winamp, and I assume it should work in XMMS or whatever Linux distributions are using now.

Yes, it uses HTTP as transport medium, so it doesn't have all of the nifty features - but if you want just to listen to music, it's *great*.

I found very interesting a document from Jack Moffitt (of xiph.org fame,
one of the main Ogg developers and one of the Icecast Core Developers),
about some problems he had with the BK license when he was using it
for hosting Icecast:

"A Critique of the BitKeeper License"
http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/x/i/xiphmont/Pu blic/critique.html


You might also find interesting his post on the matter to the
"Icecast Developer Discussion List":

http://www.xiph.org/archives/icecast-dev/0067.html

I hope that he will post here his his experience using BK
in an Open/Free-source project...

Best regards

\\Uriel



P.S.: Yea, I know I'm karma whoring, but I'm sure many people will find this interesting,
specially in casse Jack dont post to this history latter

* 1 ID selector (set unit's ID to 1-8) on back

* Uses 10BT chip and 2 $2 TI A/D chip to convert sound to/from PCM on the network

* Cost: $US150

mpg is dead, AVI and Quicktime killed it in the streaming format, try finding streaming mpg's anywhere.

Well, I didn't need to look too far!...

MPEG is far from death at this time. Sure, it may not be a perfect streaming solution (lack of streaming framework and high CPU use if no encoder hardware is used), but for video storage it's great.

I mean, it's not like my DVD player would suddently play Sorenson QT. Or Windows Media. Nay, they play MPEG and AAC data.

Have you tried the icecast streaming system? I've been running it pretty much nonstop for a few months with no trouble at all.

Besides, I found it was far more stable than icecast, although I still keep an eye on their development.
You just drop your mp3's into a directory and can provide on-demand content.

Shameless somewhat on-topic plug below :P

I stream Kentucky's entire General Assembly session including committee and chamber meetings live using RealServer & RealProducer (for encoding). Once you begin to build an audience for such an event, you would be surprised how important people feel it is to watch events live. Also, archiving a large volume of events for people to download or stream is the real pain in the arse. My how 3-8 meetings a day for 2-3 months on end can wear down a guy supposedly hired as a web application developer! Harumph!

I support RMS's political statement, and here's why. RealServer/RealProducer to date does not allow me to schedule events for streaming or archiving. It basically is a throw the switch to start streaming and archiving type of system. I have expressed my need for some method of scheduling to RealNetworks numerous support calls and even to supposed Real developers at their conference in San Jose. That was a year ago, and I've heard no word. Lariat, another company I spoke with at the Real Conference last year, said they would have an scheduling application for use with RealServer/RealProducer available in July of 2000. It was December of 2000 before they released the software. Too late!

With nearly 200 meetings to stream at all times of the day for 2-3 months, I don't have the time to watch a video feed all day long and click a button to begin streaming and archiving. In dire need of a method to schedule events for streaming/archiving, I wrote a Perl module to work with a SQL database of events that are entered via a Web interface. It got me by despite the fact that we're running Windows NT on all our servers! No native CRON daemon! Ack!

Despite my manager and network admin being card-carrying Microsoftians, I probably could have pressured them into running an open source streaming video server. But there are none, and I think that may be RMS's motive behind his demand. I hope the open source community does not bahhumbug streaming media too much longer. Its importance to end users will continue to grow.

Finally, there is good news on the open source audio streaming front. Icecast is an open source audio streaming server that continues to improve thanks to some talented programmers. Those in need of an audio only streaming solution should give it a look.

Yes, there is a difference between Coke (tm) and Pepsi (tm). Just like there's a difference between S-video and Composite, as between DVD and VHS. Similarly, any serious audiophile (and probably anyone else who listens for music quality) will be able to tell the difference between an MP3 and a CD. I can certainly tell the difference, even on my not-so-great PC speakers.

Others have commented on the difference between MP3, OGG, and CD. I don't know yet, because until Icecast streams Ogg Vorbis format, I won't bother re-ripping my CDs.

There is no reason to use proprietary software to send out an audio-only stream. Icecast is all you need.

Video is a different matter: for Video, you get to choose between: RealVideo (cross-platform, but very, very expensive); Microsoft (Windows-only, but "free"); and QuickTime (Windows and Mac only, but "free".)

• My audio streams and how I do them ;
• My video stream and how I do it .

I'll admit up front that I haven't read the article - the comments already posted about it tell me that it's probably a waste of time. The theme, apparently, is that "geeks" are preventing the internet from being a spiffy, flashy experience. Obviously, that's ignorant foolishness. Not only would getting geeks out of the 'net not make it prettier, it would prevent the continued development of the "Rich Experience®" that the marketroids are pushing...:

• MNG for animated graphics
  
• PNG for still images
• Ogg Vorbis for sound and music
• Icecast for "Internet Radio"
• PHP for dynamic web page generation
• (Not to mention PERL for the same sort of thing!)
• The Infrastructure to deliver all this stuff affordably in the first place (too many links to post! OS's, servers, etc...)

And I'm certain there are plenty more examples people could add to this list...

Otherwise, for MP3 straming, it works great.

--
Evan

www.icecast.org - I believe they have something video in the works.

I don't subscribe to the notion that these are in opposition to one another. That OpenBSD is not always the answer is very true. But all good things have their purposes. In fact, I use them both in my segmented, handy-man-special, home network:

OpenBSD for Mac68K (all these were bought for a pittance on eBay):
2 Quadra 700s: transparent firewall (ipf) and 3-legged NAT (ipnat)
Quadra 610: mail server (qmail)
Centris 610 (w/68040): dns server (djbdns)

LinuxPPC: (Bastille'd by using the Sparc trick on the FAQ)
2 7300s: apache and MySQL (soon to be PostgreSQL?)
9500/G3: mol / streaming with videod, icecast (Better choices are welcome.)
Pismo PowerBook: dual boot

I haven't had as many years using Linux (only 2) as you have. And aside from that my computer experience amounts to a few mid-'80s semesters of VAXen and the entire life of the Mac platform -- and around 4 months of NetBSD and OpenBSD. But I have to say it (adding BSD to the mix) hasn't been that hard at all. There are many similarities with Linux. Much of your current knowledge will transfer. For anyone who has learned guitar and then tried bass, or ukulele, you've experienced this before.

-B...

At the risk of some RIAA maven finding it, very few people seem to have mentioned the Shoutcast DNAS and Icecast. Shoutcast is moving towards generating analysis of listeners including the 'golden number' of listener time. Site/station popularity is already covered by the Shoutcast directory and associated services like Live 365. While low bandwidth continues to be common, 24 or 56k streaming of the traditional one-to-many radio format remains a popular and usable choice for online listening. The majority of servers on the system tend to be hobbyist or vanity shows but I'm sure it wouldn't take much work to integrate a big hard drive full of tunes with some smart database software to create a DARLA-ish server for streaming .

I suspect that with the availability of mp3 mixers, icecast, etc, a nice solution for the communications problem should be achievable. Timing, on the other hand, is another matter, but then that's what clocks are for :)

Bill - aka taniwha
--

Wait - cool! Icecast, huh? Maybe they can look into it... sounds like it would be perfect for GiS...

(Either that, or my &^(%ing SB Live! Platinum card to work under Linux... Yes, I've installed the Emu10k module, no it doesn't work right (yet).)

icecast can do it. if you drop files into the static_dir, you can get them from http://icecast-server.whatever.com:8000/file/some. mp3 icecast isn't built for on demand streaming, since apache does that job quite nicely. just get an m3u file, and link to the mp3 on the web server. it works quite nicely. try this for details.

also, and very important, IMHO.

Moffitt, who is overseeing the project, is himself the creator of the open-source Icecast, a streaming MP3 technology similar to Nullsoft's Shoutcast, now owned by America Online. He came to iCast last year when the company acquired Net radio firm Green Witch.

Icecast mixed with a nice audio format, nearly built in, will make for outstanding internet "radio" stations. This is mostly how I listen to MP3. Streaming. There are thousands of stations. All sorts of genres. 24/7/365 No commercials. It's awesome. With this, it will be possible to set up a truly free radio network. When wireless IP becomes common, the real radio better watch out.

And as a quick aside (I deal with radio stations and their web efforts on a daily basis) the radio industry is clueless about what is right around the corner. They are coming around, but now corporate inertia has brought them to a near complete stop. Case in point...This is the webside for AMFMi, the internet arm of AMFM (Yes, I'm serious, they just recently did a "reorg"), the largest radio holding company in the nation. Here is a quick rundown on their "terrestrial" efforts.

Lots of what they call "market potential" around this area, no?
--

Yes. But Shoutcast is a commercial product, as you can read on the license, and I doubt there is any source available. There are versions for some unices, indeed.

Icecast seems to do a great job and it's under GPL, but it needs an external mp3 encoder. This is the bad point: free ones like BladeEnc and Lame are under pressure by the Fraunhofer patent (at least in USA and Germany).

It's really a pity, because Lame 3.70 has a really good psycoachustic model, encodes at a speed that is twice the real time on a 300MHz system, can also do variable bitrate encoding (slower). It can also perform the re-encoding on the fly to change the bitrate, which is a must when you have to broadcast mp3 ad a certain speed.

But patents hold down all this in the non-commercial use, even in countries where patents on software are not allowed (Europe), due to some legal tricks (I believe).

My 0.02 Euro.

1. As mentioned above the premeir open-source on is www.icecast.org, The original is www.shoutcast.com, for additional resources and to talk to people their is www.shoutclub.com.

2. If you want to stream *live* audio then liveice (which is part of icecast) shout work, if you on windows then use the SC plugin for winamp.

3.One of the biggest problems isnt software its bandwidth!! A decent sounding stream is at least 56K minimum, even with a T1 your nadwidth can max out quickly, if your stream is non-commercial then look into www.live365.com which provides free bandwidth for non-commercial streams along with a slew of tools.

4. If you need more advice then check out www.bigfreakinserver.com. This is our site we have a forum which we monitor frequently and will be happy to answer any streaming questions. bigfreak pipes out 3 streams over a 768Kbps DSL line, running on a dual proc Celercon, running FreeBSD :).

5. Finally here is a little fun tools for all you stream listeners, called streamripper located at www.bigfreakinserver.com (Look in the PROJECTS section). Which allows you to hook up to an mp3 and rip the tracks directly to your hardrive :). very fun indeed.

Well enjoy the resources.

Try icecast. it supposedly works well. www.icecast.org

---

If the response is "I can't afford a DAT," then you also probably wouldn't be able to afford good enough computer hardware capable of making a quality recording of a live performance, either.

A DAT would save me a lot of trouble, however I already have a computer that is sufficient (for now at least.) Last night one band offered to let me borrow a digital 4-track for recording future events so I might do that. Keep in mind that I am NOT a musician (nor do I play one on MTV.) I love music but don't have any talent in that area. That's a huge part of the reason I'm doing this.

Another possibility that is showing some promise is getting sponsored with IDSL or ADSL access at one of the local bars so I can broadcast live events. If that happens the computer will become an absolute requirement. The software I use for that will be icecast which allows MP3 streaming.

numb

Kind of scanned over what you said, but I'm here listening to streamed MP3 free. None of commercial on this station (afaik). F the radio. Chuck it out the window (smash those windows too). http://129.174.182.219/ is where my program says it's coming from. Ice & shout cast. It works. Me bed now apology. http://www.icecast.org/ equals open source streaming audio, so says the title... Boycott (corporate) radio! So'ze in generally boycott radio (got to figure out the car thing -- maybe da wireless Internet will help d'ere) Who the hell wants to be an audiophile? I just want to listen to music.

Liveice with icecast on line in. Keep the radio connected to line in.

If you wish to stream static MP3s, get Shout or Yell and stream those.

Yell is available from part of my website as I am the primary developer. It's in development, and is not yet feature complete. It will, however, let you keep a couple of CDs worth of MP3s looping in sequential or random play -- there is some skipping, though. It appears to be a bug in the icecast server (assumptions made about br and buffersize). I'm working with some members of the icecast dev team on it.

Icecast is, of course, available from Icecast.org, and contains Shout as a part of the standard package. Shout has some trickier issues, though. AFAIK, signalling is not working in Linux by default because of how Linux handles signals. Grab the CVS Shout for the fix :-)

---

The current state of streaming media seems to be a joke. I have found some radio programs I would like to listen to, but the "high speed" feeds are for 28.8 modems and stream at 16kbps. The quality is horrid. Its a shame, considering I have ADSL. I want a 128kbps feed for audio, until then I think it is just a novelty and to painful to listen to. I wonder if the broadcasting industry will legally prevent high quality streaming media.

This remains sadly true for the majority of commerical audio sources on the net. But you have heard of shoutcast and icecast? Both sites have a directory service listing mp3 streams, an number of which are 128kbps or greater. That offers excellent quality, better than fm radio, if I can compare apples and oranges.

I live in an area with poor broadcast radio coverage, so this has been an invaluable service for me in finding new music. And it's really nice not to have to listen to commercials. :)

Jeez, anyone ever heard of shoutcast? There's even an open source version available, icecast. These will stream mp3's like they were never-ending web page. They can do live broadcasts, playlists, etc.

Oddly enough I posted this story last week but Slashdot ignored it..... Perhaps because I pointed out that the whole site is an exact carbon copy (check some of the html and layouts) of Myplay.com.

Myplay have been offering an online storage system like this for free for the last 4 months and they don't force you to use their technology, or limit you to streaming only.

So - for all you Unix users who don't want to cart a CD selection back and forth here's an online music HOWTO

(1) Get CD Paraoia or cdda2wav
(2) get LAME
( You can also get GRIP - that's a fancy GUI system that uses GTK - nice and easy)
(3) Extract your favourte CD audio to .wav files
(4) encode .wav files to .mp3 files using LAME
(5) Delete the .wav files

then....
(6) Get XMMS
(7) Listen to your funky mp3's


Now for the anytime/anywhere part....
(8) go to Myplay.com
(9) Get an account (they're free)
(10) upload your chosen tracks
(11) Listen to them wherever you go


okokok but there's more

If you want to show off your music taste you can assemble your favourite tracks into public playlists which anybody can listen to - so it's like creating a radio show. (they use icecast for this BTW)

Plus they've also got a few free tracks, both from themselves and from affiliates like emusic.com....


SO.... my.mp3.com is not Innovative... it's a copy.

So - why isn't myplay in the related links box?

I'd like to nominate the Icecast project. After the huge hype of Shoutcast, which allowed anyone with WinAmp to repeat their MP3 audio to a server (thusly to many listeners), these people sat down and said "We can do better -- and we can do under the GPL." The rest is history.

With the latest stable release being v1.3, they have allowed many to setup their own MP3 streaming music servers. It's very handy for setting up (via a program like Yell or Shout, which send the MP3s to the server without reencoding) a small 486 box in the corner that can be a jukebox for an entire LAN. They have also pioneered some important updates to the defacto Shoutcast standard.

An interview with Jack Moffitt, the team leader, is available from LinuxToday

Note: Their parent sponsor, Greenwitch has been down since the 1st of January, with DNS service non existant. As I write this message, their DNS is still not working. The DNS fixes are propagating, and the Icecast people are available on norton.openprojects.net #icecast.
---

Actually, with liveice and icecast, it can work quite well. You can configure it to use different encoders like FhG and Xing to encode the audio live from the soundcard. I'm the student engineer at my station here in Miami, WVUM, and we're in the process of putting together a box for this purpose. Some guy from the school of communications tried to sell the advisory board on RealAudio, but for any decent amount of users, the licensing cost goes into the tens of thousands of dollars, even with an "educational discount." We're going to try to use Live 365 for starters, until we get more bandwidth from the university. If anyone has any advice or experience on that or any related issues, please feel free to share.

Icecast is the solution for these kinds of problems. 1) It is the most support streaming server available. It supports all mp3 clients, RealPlayer G2 (PC AND Mac), and Windows Media Player. Nothing else currently does this. 2) It's free, it's open source, and it runs on basically anything. It's the only server running on Linux MIPS (Cobalt Raq's!) and it's been ported to BeOS, OS/2, and every flavor of *nix imagineable. hell.. someone even had a Novell one going for a while. 3) No expensive hardware needed. You dont' need a powerful machine. A p2 class CPU and 128MB ram will go a long way. You could encode and server on the same machine, probably to around 1000 clients simultaneously. No one's ever shown me a box that couldn't saturate the pipe it was on. Buy an 800$ Celeron box, with 128MB memory. put your favorite version of *nix on it, and have fun. Any questions? Visit Icecast

• icecast - streaming 'shoutcast' clone for linux.
• Large mp3 collection. (BYOA - bring your own archive. *g*)
• If you think you won't have more than 50 simultanious listeners on this box, a K6-350 or a P266 ought to be sufficient. Due to the nature of icecast, it only needs to encode the stream *once* and stream it out - so it's largely a bandwidth issue. If you're going to have more than 50, and will be serving dyn-html off the same site (generating playlists and whatnot), you might want something abit more beefy. Either way, consider 256mb of RAM your minimum.
• As for HDD, here again - it just 'depends'. A good strategy might be two drives - one for your mp3 archive / wav files, the other for your web pages & stuff. Regular old IDE drives will do well under this setup and you don't have to worry much about blips in the audio if you have the streams on a seperate (dedicated) drive
• Apache web server with perl_mod and/or php3_mod. But this is more for quick development of webpages and access to databases than anything else.
• I don't know if it'll be much use to you, but I couldn't resist plugging my mp3db program to help organize your collection. :)
• I would seriously recommend ripping / encoding on a seperate box to keep the load down. I'm sure there won't be a problem finding volunteers to send you pre-encoded mp3s on campus. :^) If you want a free software encoder, check out LAME (no url, sorry!) - it works very well as long as you give it somewhat high bitrates. Otherwise freshmeat has a variety of mp3 utilities in the app index under console/mp3

• Hope this helps!
  
  --

You can use icecast for a free shoutcast compatible mp3 server.

... The only thing interesting me nowadays is icecast.. Particularly the HHG radio show (requires x11amp/mpg123/winamp and >128kbps feed) and Mercury Bath (ditto)....

> Actually, I can think of some instances in which sound card drivers could be vital for a
> web server. How about streaming audio over the 'net from a live sound source?

When you do live streaming audio, you use don't use your web server to encode the audio - you use a separate, dedicated machine for that. This is true for Real Audio as well as Shoutcast and the open-source Icecast.

(I'm not talking out my ass here - I geek for Technostate, an internet radio station that broadcasts live events.)

Now if someone would just roll out a decent MP3 streaming client for Mac so I can ditch all these Real servers...

You can just use icecast to do this. This is actually what they're going to use - I just talked with them, and they should have an icecast broadcast going soon.