As in, straight from my studio directly to the people who click on the “LISTEN!” link, without commercials and the stuff in between. Will I need my own servers, what about this bandwith I keep hearing people complain about? I was reading something about Windows Media Player that lets you host your own live streaming stuff and it talked about something called MIME, will I need to worry about this for my internet station? Anyone out there with their own station who could help me out?
Sounds like you’re not too well versed in the ways of having your own server. Might I suggest not trying to set up your own thing and checking out a service such as Live365?
I was looking to do something similar while in college (once for just a hypothetical class assignment, and once to do something in conjunction with the school newspaper’s web site) and the actual setting up of a server/station was pretty costly, even for a school with its own bandwidth. Something like Live365 seemed much more economical and easy.
This might be a help:
http://www.peercast.org/
“PeerCast.org was established in April 2002 as a non-profit site providing free peer-to-peer broadcasting software. The aim of the project is to create an easy to use, simple and reliable software client that enables anyone to broadcast streaming media on the Internet without the need for expensive servers or bandwidth.”
I cannot vouch for usefulness or anything, I just heard of this before.
For the love of God and all that is holy, do NOT use a Windows Media Player stream. You wouldn’t want to isolate any potential listeners, would you? Streaming MP3 can be listened to on practically any computer, and you can offer different quality streams for broadband or dial-up listeners.
For starters:
Shoutcast FAQ (a Nullsoft product, and it’s free)
IceCast (another MP3 streamer, supports Windows)
I use shoutcast for my station. It took a little work to get it set up, gut the shoutcast folks have a really good forum where you can learn what you need to do to set it all up.
I am using a DSL connection, but with my bandwidth, anything over 4 listeners at a time can cause some skipping (and I refuse to lower my bit rate farther:) )
However, i highly reccomend you use a separate computer to stream from (separate than the one you use daily) otherwise when you’re doing other processor intenize tasks it will interrupt the stream.