Personal Use FLAC Streaming Solutions?

Kulaid982 asks: "A friend of mine has challenged me to put together an internet music server for him. Ideally he'd like to stream music from his apartment to work. I'm aware of mod_mp3 for Apache, and Shoutcast seems to be a great streaming option, however, most of his music is FLAC or WAV. Obviously, .wav files are only streamable over the fastest networks, so is there an option for on the fly encoding to MP3 or FLAC to stream it? This will be a dedicated music-streaming box for his own personal use. I'm sure someone out there has already done this or something similar, so please share; how'd you pull it off?" "Some technical specifics: The box is a P3 800 with 512MB of RAM, so I'm thinking Linux over Windows; his internet connection is 3 Mbps down, 256kbps up; and his collection is ~400GB, and is a mix of WAV, FLAC, and SHN (SHORTEN) formats."

Comments

Use...

[keeleysam]

-Windows 2000 or XP
-Winamp 2.92 (yes i know its old but it supports shoutcast)
-SHN and FLAC Winamp plugins
-Winamp Shoutcast DSP plugin
-Windows Shoutcast server

The DSP enocdes to MP3 on the fly, and really dosn't use much in the way of system resources.

The only problem i cna think of is remote control.

Supercast

[p7]

Try this http://supercast.sourceforge.net/.

SlimServer

[spiralscratch]

Get it here

Runs great on my server, which is almost identical system to the one specified. It should handle everything you need, including multiple formats and transcoding.

Their hardware is not required (but as an owner of one, I can say it is cool).

SlimServer? Apache::MP3?

[legLess]

Have you looked at SlimServer? It's an open source Perl server designed to power Slim Devices' MP3 players.

I used it for a bit, but ditched it in favor of Lincoln Stein's Apache::MP3. My SO still uses SlimServer to stream from home to work, though. The two coexist well on my little Debian server. I don't know if SlimServer supports FLAC; Apache::MP3 does.

one part: upling speed

[sootman]

I can tell you from personal experience (since it's what I have) that a 256k uplink is not enough to reliably stream a 128kbps file. It is just baaaarely enough to move 1 MB per minute, which is about what a 128k mp3 winds up being, and given real-world network conditions, you will never get a reliable enough link to even play one song without pauses. So, the next step down is 112k or 96k.

At that point, the files are getting pretty small. A 128k mp3 is 1/10 the size of a .wav, and if FLAC gives 50% compression, 96k files--the largest you might expect to stream smoothly--is still 1/6 the size. So that 400 GB can shrink to about 60 GB (at which point, a 60 GB iPod becomes worth considering as well*) so there's not much reason not to just compress the whole collection to 96kbps mp3 or AAC or OGG and use that compressed copy as the source of what gets served/streamed.

* an iPod would solve a lot of problems while creating very few. The main problem is the cost. OTOH, it doesn't depend on network availability. It can be used in a lot more places than a computer can. It will play mp3, aac, wav, aiff, and Apple's lossless codec. And it can store files and do other cool things.

Re:one part: upling speed

[Bishop]

In my experience you can stream 128kbit/s on a 256kbit/s link if a large enough recieve buffer is used. You can almost stream 196kbit/s reliably.

I agree with the idea of compressing the music and storeing it in a more portable format.

Re:No, you repeat after me

[c0d3h4x0r]

Just literally plugging the question into Google usually yields plenty of information:

Personal Use FLAC Streaming Solutions?

It's a fun game to play -- try it with other recent Ask Slashdot entries and you start to see how asinine most of the posted questions actually are.

Ampache

[phlipper]

http://www.ampache.org/ - It's a LAMP-based server, easy to use w/ some good features.

Currently the following file formats are supported.

* MP3 (Id3v1 & Id3v2)
* OGG
* WMA
* RM
* M4A/AAC/MP4 (Itunes files)
* FLAC
* MPC