I've spent most of this evening testing out audio streaming on my redundant test server. I gotta tell you, it's pretty sweet. The principle is actually quite simple, you have a "DJ" at home on a normal PC playing music on their media player (in this case WinAmp) which uses their internet connection to transmit the music to a server (which has the correctly configured software on it) which then acts as the "transmitter" that other people can connect to in order to hear the broadcast.<br /><br />Well, what's the point in going via a server? The point is that the average Joe's internet connection can only upload (send to the internet) a small amount of information at any one time because their upstream connection is so "weak". If lots and lots of other people suddenly want to listen to that person's broadcast then Joe's internet connection is going to take such a battering that it'd render it useless and none of the listeners would get anything like a decent, audible broadcast. A server on the otherhand is design to have a <em>much</em> stronger internet connection (100mbit in my case) which is 400 times faster than the average residential connection which obviously means that the person making the broadcast can reach a far wider audience but also keep their home bandwidth low while the server does the grunt work.<br /><br />It was a bitch to make work, but now that it's done it's quite easy to use and so far there are three streams on there for three different stations! Woot!<br />
