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Streaming MP3 For Linux Server Guide
A reader writes: "
Does Howard Stern boil your bacon? Do you wish there was a station that only played songs by the Bouncing Souls? After reading this guide, you can show the world that Howie ain't got game, and that songs about soccer(football) are where it's at. The purpose of this document is to describe the process of using Linux-based tools to setup a server used for streaming MP3 data.
Find out how to setup your own with
this full guide"
MP3 streams are already compressed. The MP3 system is your basic spectral transform-quantize-encode system. To compress the streams, re-encode them at a lower bitrate with an MP3 encoder designed for this (e.g. Fraunhofer).
(LAME is still illegal in the United States).Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Make sure you obey the DMCA Broadcast Rules... "A mix cannot contain more than three tracks from the same album in a three-hour period". Then again, if you're willing to follow the DMCA, just post your mix up on myplay.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
I have a really big MP3 collection (more than 15GB of all my own stuff, ripped from my CDs). I spend a LOT of time on the road, generally with either a broadband or V.90 connection, and it isn't feasible/possible to bring all my music with me wherever I go. Rather, they are sitting on a server in my home office.
As I'm not a coder, I would pay serious cash for someone to write a Web interface to my MP3s that would present a dynamically-generated list of all of the several thousand MP3s (broken into several pages), with checkboxes next to each MP3 listed. I'd check the boxes of all the ones I wanted to listen to, and click Submit. It would then make the playlist on the fly from that submission, and fire up a streaming server with that playlist. I'd then point Winamp to it, and I'd have ALL of the MP3s I want to listen to, and NONE that I don't, streamed to me wherever I am.
(I'd put some sort of access protection on the stream, to make sure [a] I get all the bandwidth, and [b] so RIAA can't sue me.)
Better yet, does something like this already exist? Am I the only one that wants something like this?
--
I'd love to know how I could do something similar with Apache for when I'm in Linux instead.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
This guide has a copyright:
"This document is copyright © 2000-2001 by Ray. You are encouraged to redistribute it. However you may not modify this document, if you intend to redistribute it in any manner."
Why can't I modify it?
What if someone introduces some new utility in the future which makes this job even easier? What if it's in error? Should I redistribute a faulty document?
Apparently, all of the Linuxlookup guides are copyrighted in this fashion.
Interestingly Linuxlookup.com doesn't quite buy into the whole Open Source thing, at least not when it comes to their creations.
Not only didn't he look at shoutcast, he didn't look at javashout (which sucks btw), he forgot to mention that shout-8.0 has timing bugs when working with icecast, read the phorum at icecast.org if you don't belive me. As far as i know, the only version of shout that doesn't fuck up is shout 0.4.1.
He doesn't talk about tons of freakin weird features in icecast, or the advangates of shoutcast. for instance, icecast can't do meta streaming correctly (track title info). i've never seen it list on shoutcast.com correctly. it's own meta streaming protocol is not supported. shoutcast has a much better web interface, it also scales better. it generates usagfe charts (i think).
He doesn't talk about how to relay your stream from live365, he doesn't talk about listing on shoutcast.com. lots and lots of crap. damit, i should write my own freakin FAQ.
btw: this is Justin Frankel writer of Winamp i'm replying to, right?
-Jon
this is my sig.
Unfortunatly, P2P is not really the same as radio. Lissining to radio means that you *want* a DJ to chose the songs for you. The truth is that there are fundamentally three parties involved in the music lissening process: the data provider, the DJ, and the lissener. These parties may be devided up in many diffrent ways. Examples:
1) "Data provider == DJ == Lissener" is the traditional mp3 and CD system.
2) "Data provider == DJ != Lissener" is the trditional radio system.
3) "Data provider != DJ == Lissener" is the fast download system you are describing.
4) "Data provider == Lissener != DJ" is the system used by my artificial intelegence based mp3 player Smartplay. It only playes songs from your drive, but it uses a simple AI to guess your mood and it had a more efficent user interface to help keep you from waisting a lot of time skipping songs.
Anyway, there is really nothing keeping us from a "Data provider != DJ != Lissener" system. This would mean that the DJs would broadcast URLs and mixing instructions, but not necissarily the mp3 data it's self, and the download sites would wait for a significant portion of the lisseners to login before starting the multicast download of the song. The point is that you would not need to have a lot of bandwidth to be a DJ and the lisseners computer can hack together the playlists from multiple DJs to allow for even greater variety.
I tend to think that a hybrid of the "Data provider != Lissener != DJ" and the artivifial intelegence selection of DJs (ala smartplay's selection of songs, but for whole DJs instead---based on what they were plaing right now and your mood) would be the very best solution.
Jeff
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
well i couldn't find a 24/7 metalica station at live365, but i did find 150 stations that play metalica here
-Jon
this is my sig.
Yes. You want to make the stream as small as possible to allow it to travel over the network taking as little bandwidth as possible. So the stream is encoded by the server and decoded by the client. Generally the stream is made up of pre-encoded MP3 files, because encoding is more compute-intensive than decoding, and a 486 couldn't handle that. Basically, all streaming servers do is read from disk and write to a network pipe.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Napster can be used like a streaming audio directory if you have enough bandwidth and find users with the right speed. I have played a lot of songs while d/ling them. Pretty cool: 1) Search any song you like, 2) find fastest location, 3) play live. For maximum speed, Kazaa is quite cool, it bundles downloads from several locations to achieve higher speeds.
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Ok guys, I'm the webmaster of a french webradio (http://www.bide-et-musique.com). Since the last 6 months I've been batteling with all the programs I found to make a good webradio under linux.
This was really really hard getting something good.
First I tried icecast, as an open source believer this was my first choice. Believe me I've tried everything, but this is a lot of trouble if you want to stream the name of the song too. The main problem is that if the listener gets out of sync, he won't be able to reconnect correctly automatically. This is VERY VERY annoying and makes icecast practically unusable on my setup. Perhaps I did something wrong, but I never had an answer to my pledges for help to the authors.
So I'm stuck using shoutcasts server, and believe me this is really sad for me, because some of icecast features where relly nice for me, like multiple streams in the same server.
Ok after the server you'll want to have some interactivity with the listener, this is where the stream program shows. I was not satisfied with what I found on the net (and I tried everything). So I ended up using libshout, which is GREAT, really. You've got like 5 functions, and it works incredibly good. My streams are up now since 3 weeks, with no problems, no mem leaks, no nothing.
So for me a good setup for interactive streaming is : shoutcast (unless icecast is fixed, then icecast is 100% the best choice), libshout and some little programming skill, a database for the streaming program to get the files from and of course a nice web site. Those understanding french will see that my site is really interactive.
Of course you'll have to pay RIAA/ SACEM (france)/ whatever hellish company if your country, but that's another story 8(
J-F Mammet
bidemaster@bide-et-musique.com
Here is a project that is putting a streaming server onto a floppy distribution. It's alpha right now, but kind of cool that you can run such a thing off of a floppy disk and a 486.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Uhh no.. the shoutcast server does no such transcoding either.. i.e. you can use shout with shoutcast server if you want to.. -Justin
There are some services already existing that allow you to do this. Specifically, take a look at the Soundbooth at Wall of Sound, an offering from the Walt Disney Internet Group (formerly GO.com). It has a very cool interface which allows you to choose what types of songs to play on your station, as well as being able to choose specific artists and songs to be played. You can also choose how often these are played when you set them up AND on-the-fly as they are playing.
The bad part is that the player runs off of Real Player which has problems with Netscape 4.x (I haven't tried NS6/Mozilla with this yet, although that's my preferred browser these days). But it is still very cool!
Disclaimer: ;) Go to the Member Made stations and enter "StealthDaveRocks". I've been using it since the internal beta stages, and I can definitely say it rocks!
For those of you who may not have guessed this already, I do work for the Walt Disney Internet Group, albeit in a completely different division (and building for that matter) than Wall of Sound. But that doesn't make it any less cool! Almost everyone in our department uses it instead of downloading MP3s or listening to CDs. If you like modern rock and classic rock, check the StealthDaveRocks station! (I warned you there would be a shameless plug!
Additional Disclaimer:
My opinions are my own, and are not sanctioned by Disney, Bill Nye the Science Guy, or the U.N. Security Council.
- Stealth Dave
--
Evil is as eval("does");
I tried something similar recently w/ mpg123 and a '486. I couldn't get the 486 to decode the MP3s fast enough -- even with mpg123 niced to the max. There is a market for these MP3 players in restauraunts &c but the cost factor for even a first generation pentium makes it not worth the effort. A 486-based solution would make it economically viable.
Anyone have any luck decoding MP3s on prehistoric hardware??
In the latest issue of linux journal, there is a vey good article on how to set up your own mp3 streaming server using all open source tools. It's a very good read.
-mdek.net
eh am I the only one that's wondering why this was posted? when have howtos been news.. or is this some breakthrough i'm not aware of?
...says that Icecast "devours fewer CPU cycles and uses less memory?".. Maybe he should actually do some testing if he wants to make those claims... -Justin
I like my MP3s steamed with some butter, garlic, and a few Frauenhaufer execs shredded on top.
Oh. stReaming MP3s. My mistake. But MP3 recipes are important, too...
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Stream Vorbis! Once they get RTP/RTSP encapsulation working right (soon, some proof-of-concept has already been done), Vorbis is the free (and often higher-quality) alternative to MP3. After the new year, you'll have to pay for MP3. You have been warned.
Icecast requires that your MP3 files already be at the bitrate at which you will stream them (normally 32 kbps). Shoutcast, OTOH, uses a licensed MP3 codec to downsample from 192 kbps to 32 kbps, which Icecast can't do because of some stupid patent.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
http://spiralx.dyndns.org/howto.html
:::
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Vaginux.
"eat me".