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Removing Ads from a Live Audio Stream in Unix?

Posted by Cliff on from the who-wants-to-listen-to-radio-ads-anyways dept.

Soothh writes "A local radio station here is finally doing streaming audio again on the net so i can listen at work. The catch, they go through Hiwire, which only supports Windows Media Player. Their tech page says that this technology has 'proven difficult to implement on the Unix platform.' Is there any validity to the claim that WMP is the only cost effective way to remove commercials. Anyone know other ways to get streams from real radio stations on a *nix platform?"

2 of 25 comments (clear)

  1. Low Tech Solution by FattMattP · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not like this is rocket science. Plug sound output of machine with stream from windows media player into input of machine with Shoutcast encoder (or whatever). Distribute your stream to the masses in MP3 from new server. So you'll lose a little quality from the re-encoding. Big deal, few people will probably notice.

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  2. Re:Here's the relevant text by Cyberdyne · · Score: 2, Insightful
    This technology has proven difficult to implement on the Unix platform. At this point we have no plans for supporting the Unix platform.

    Uhh... this is server-side technology, unless they're doing something very dumb (like streaming the raw audio, ads and all, along with a replacement set of ads to be inserted instead?!). All they need to do is send the same audio stream they send to WMP clients, but encoding in MP3, Ogg Vorbis, RealAudio or whatever. Hell, you could even do it by piping the Line Out from a Windows client into a Real/Darwin/whatever streaming server for rebroadcast!

    I don't know what the problem really is, but this "explanation" certainly doesn't hold water - either they're talking BS, or the PHBs have taken over the asylum and fallen for some really dumb FUD!