Archive for July 20th, 2006

radio king

 I&#39;ve spent most of this evening testing out audio streaming on my redundant test server. I gotta tell you, it&#39;s pretty sweet. The principle is actually quite simple, you have a &quot;DJ&quot; 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 &quot;transmitter&quot; that other people can connect to in order to hear the broadcast.<br /><br />Well, what&#39;s the point in going via a server? The point is that the average Joe&#39;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 &quot;weak&quot;. If lots and lots of other people suddenly want to listen to that person&#39;s broadcast then Joe&#39;s internet connection is going to take such a battering that it&#39;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&#39;s done it&#39;s quite easy to use and so far there are three streams on there for three different stations! Woot!<br />