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PC FM Tuner Streamed Over a LAN?
ooglek asks: "FM radio seems to be falling out of favor, with many stations putting their streams online. Unfortunately, many choose bad codecs and low bandwidth feeds, which make them practically unappealing. There seem to be a fair number of PCI-based TV Tuner cards that come with a built in FM receiver, and I'm interested in what it might take to stream my local FM stations to the Windows, Unix and Mac boxes in my house over my LAN, as well as my TiVo and Slim Devices SqueezeBox. Is this merely a pipe-dream?"
i was just listening to fm today after listening to web radio pretty much exclusivly. 5 minutes later I realize I'm picking up two stations at the same time, which is why it sounded so weird. Why not just improve web radio, if its bad it can be upgraded.
Doesn't anybody else have a receviver these days?
instead of stereo into the computer I happen to have it the other way around, and if I really wanted to listen the local rock station all I have to do I press a button.
I might be missing something but what is the point of having your computer play your radio, unless you plan on recording the banter of the DJs....
..is new again.
I am a bit troubled at this trend towards paying recurring fees to do things that have been essentially free for decades. First OTA broadcast TV, now cable. Then radio, now Sirius.
When my children are my age opening up the fridge will be a subscription service. It will be called Digi-Chill 5000(r). I just copywrited that, so no stealing it in 30 years.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
FM PCI card + Total Recorder + Shoutcast.
Or you could just try one of those Radio Sharks, which actually seems like what you want.
Capture the FM audio with your tuner card on a Mac. Then use Nicecast to stream it. Nicecast can basically stream any audio on your Mac.
The thing is, the radio station has a clean signal to work with. Compression algorithms will work relitively well with that, but if you use the audio that comes from F.M. it will introduce alot of noise. This won't work as well as with the clean signal and in the end you'll probably have use more bandwidth just to broadcast the same audio at about the same quality.
I bought a USB Radioshark, set it up under Linux, and used Icecast with Liveice to setup realtime streaming.
I then setup a cgi to change stations. Works like a charm.
I'd got snapped up from my astronomy position in the UK to come and contract for a couple of months in the US, I'd been developing software like mp3serv/liveice/icecast. But, I didn't want to leave behind UK radio - like the Essential Mix, John Peel or The Breezeblock - the BBC website offered low quality real audio. I left my radio plugged into my computer at the observatory and streamed all the UK radio across the atlantic to my office in the US....
Sadly... I don't have an office in the UK any more so I guess my best bet now is Sirius radio.
I believe Beyond TV 4 can do it. Or at the very least, record shows which then become available for streaming over the web interface on port 8129.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
VideoLan Client (bad naming, but it can both receive network streams and originate them) http://www.videolan.org/ They even have precompiled clients for most popular OSes and distributions.
Wow, three articles in a row: US arcades are dead, DVD is dead, now FM is dying. Is Slashdot also dead, using their logic?
1. A Mac Mini (you'll understand why in a minute.)
:-)
2. A USB FM Tuner (that's supported by the Mac). Google. There's a few out there.
3. NiceCast, (or Air Foil) from Rogue Amoeba. www.rogueamoeba.com
Simple. Seamless. That's the beauty of the Mac.
This is slightly off topic, but just the other day I submitted an ask slashdot asking how it might be possible to stream my entire audio session from one PC to another. My main desktop has no soundcard, no space to put one, and no speakers; my Media center PC has all of those, but I don't use it as my main PC. I'm looking for a solution that will allow me to stream the audio from my main desktop to my Media Center and play it there. (They're in the same room, just beside each other, for intrests sake) Any ideasd?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I assure you it sounds fine. Well, you might want to move it slightly away from your PC to avoid interference. If you want to listen in many rooms buy a radio for each one - they're pretty cheap. Or buy a portable radio that you can carry with you.
-- SIGFPE
"Sadly... I don't have an office in the UK any more so I guess my best bet now is Sirius radio."
Find a mate in the UK who will set up a streaming radio.
There's radio via the C/Ku band as well.
So far all the replies have been technical in nature, but let us not forget we live in a very legalistic society. I don't think you can legally stream broadcast radio over the internet withouth re-broadcast rights etc.. So before going through all this hassle to set this up, how about checking the legal ramifications first.
Just a thought.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
"There seem to be a fair number of PCI-based TV Tuner cards that come with a built in FM receiver, and I'm interested in what it might take to stream my local FM stations to the Windows, Unix and Mac boxes in my house over my LAN, as well as my TiVo and Slim Devices SqueezeBox. [emphasis mine]"
Within the confines of ones house, not over the Internet. Now if he had streamed it over the internet to his place of work, that might be more questionable from a couple standpoints.
That was my first thought as well. With new technologies like GNU software radio, the lines between "rebroadcasting" and "using" can become blurred.
I definitely have the right to use anything within the confines of my house. But, if I setup an antenna and let my neighbors connect their radios to it, am I "rebroadcasting"? If I setup a GNU radio box and send the (undecoded) signals out over the internet, am I "rebroadcasting"? What if I only send them to myself?
And, more importantly, why should radio and TV stations really give a damn anyways? Their services are supported by ad-revenue. If anything, I'm only helping to increase their viewership by rebroadcasting.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I've been doing it for a while. I steamed 92.3 formerly WXRK, home of Howard Stern to work pc all the time. Now I really don't have a reason too.
I use an old ISA card called radiotrack and a shoutcast server.
=1000101
Seriously, FM radio isn't exactly pristine quality to begin with.
I'd think even common 64kbit MP3 streams from a clean source at the radio station would probably sound better than a high bitrate stream generated locally from the noisy distorted signal you could receive over the air and digitize.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Orb streamign software They have/offer a free streaming server/client thingie (for both video and audio)... I realize that's only part ofthe solution, but hey..
The rub with most TV card FM tuners (unless i'm mistaken) is that you can't concurrently use the FM tuner and the TV tuner (often they share the same ADC or mpeg2 encoding "bus" )
I've been thinking of doing the same thing except re-encoding sirius/howard for personal use/personal podcasting/timeshifting but only looked at what's involved quickly...
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There's two main options. VLC will stream anything, simple as day, its fan-freaking-tastic. Really, VLC streaming is just superb.
On the other hand, there's icecasting/shoutcasting. you should be able to get a JACK stream from the FM tuner, in which case you can pickup Oddsock's Oddcast to stream it to an Oddcast/Icecast server; the server will require editing a couple lines of an xml config to get running properly but its not hard. There's plenty of other options for streaming to Icecast, I just happen to like Oddcast/JACK since its so low latency and can be configured while live. JACK is just a low latency patch-board, it can be useful. OTOH, it does take some actual CPU usage to run; liveice could potentially give you better results if you have a static setup and know you wont want to do anything else but listen to the FM stream.
Good luck, happy hacking.
Myren
C'mon, let me just suck in the whole band from 88-108MHz and separate the stations in software. Then I'd only need one "tuner" for a whole fleet of clients, and everybody could pick their own program.
And monitoring every station's RDS feed simultaneously would be a fun trick.
This is actually an interesting question and so were some others in the past.
I think the submitters should be force into developing a simple webpage that details what they did based on the knowledge slashdot gave them.
Heck, they could put it on ehow.com they have a wiki how to website http://wiki.ehow.com/Main-Page
I have a Squeezebox myself and I've thought about doing this. Actually, I'd like to get rid of my stereo system as a whole and just use the Squeezebox with powered speakers.
I've asked this question on the Slim Devices list and the answer was that, no, the slimserver doesn't do this (that would be best), but it can be done with IceCast (or any other package that does shoutcast streams). The Squeezebox and most other systems can play shoutcast MP3 streams so that would be the solution.
You could write a nice Perl plugin for SlimServer to do the tuning.
As a client for computer systems I'd use the excellent SoftSqueeze (Multi-platform Java).
X.
Otherwise, you could write / find some software to suit (I ended up writing my own). All I did was write a simple app that fed raw PCM data across a UDP socket and some playback software at the other end. With less than 20ms overall latency it was pretty good for near realtime usage, and used a very small amount of bandwith (8kHz signal, 16 bit).
www.techwatch.com.au
Right now, I'm doing this with my XM receiver (shh... don't tell them) to tune and stream audio throughout the house. I used to do this for FM as well but the server that was running it crashed and I haven't gotten around to redoing that part yet.
Why do it for XM? I like to listen to music anywhere in the house and I don't want to pay multiple subscription fees. Why for FM? The main reason was to get the audio into the computer and converted to MP3 so that I could record a few programs that I like and listen to them later. Streaming was just an added bonus for me at that time.
The basics of what you will need are:
1. An FM tuner card
2. Software for tuning (depends on card)
3. aumix for twiddling mixer settings
4. Darkice to read audio from the card
4a. Lame, or other CODEC of choice (optional)
5. Liveice to stream audio to clients
6. A little bit of fiddling to make it all work.
Uh-huh. Tell that to radio sales department where I work, I'm sure they'll get a kick out of hearing the service they give away as added value is supplanting the over-the-air signal which pays everyone's mortgage. Streaming has been a burden for most radio stations which make little, is any, money from it. FM is a highly efficient and cost effective means honed over decades to distribute 'music-data' from a single point to many destinations. Don't expect to see the transmitters turned off any time soon.
I have sort of a similar question. Yahoo still hasn't provided LAUNCHCast support for Safari/ Macintosh (or even Firefox/ IE users on Mac, for that matter) users. My girlfriend has an iBook, and enjoyed using LaunchCast's free service in the past, but now, of course she can't use it. I set her up with an account on my home server, running Server 2k3, so she could try to listen through RDP, but the quality is pretty bad/ it's choppy. Is there anything easy/ free that I could use to set up an audiostream served from my server, so it'll be buffered, so she'll get at least decent sound quality. Even if it has to stop to buffer occasionally, that's better than it just cracking up.
On the same note, I bet this fella could do the same thing. Have some sort of software that just grabs the audio output from the tuner's software, and streams it over his home network. I just have no clue what software to use.
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FM audio is pretty low quality to begin with. The compression that stations use (audio engineering compression, not data) tends to bollocks up the sound compared to what you hear from a CD. So I don't see how web radio is much different. The streams online are the equivalent of FM in most cases with the exception of talk radio where you don't need quality (in either content or audio integrity ;P ). But in answer to your question, I would say look for a tuner that is supported by the ALSA project. As long as that tuner's radio signal can be read from /dev, you should be fine. Then use the Xine media player with its --broadcast option to broadcast the audio stream to any other Xine player on your network.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I believe that the ATI AIW cards that have FM capability show up as another audio source in Windows, you should hopefully be able to use that as your input into either VLC or Windows Media Encoder to stream. You can use Remote Desktop or VNC to control the software (this is the simple answer from someone who doesn't code). Otherwise why not just run an FM tuner into the line-in jack.
You can also receive most local radio stations over FM on the cable company's signal -- at least in my part of the woods. It's pretty good quality -- far better than over the air, and probably better than the low-bit rate MP3 streams.