I was on a week off and was wondering how to set up a radio station within a network or to host in the internet. It would be really kool to have our own radio stations with our name on it. Wooow!!! That’s impressive. So first thought that was running in my mind was “How about creating streaming software? Well, it can be a very primitive Radio Station … and hmm … I can do it with Java or Flash”. But later I made up my mind to try out for existing tools first instead of creating one.
Well, the typical network radio station works as below:
There are three roles in setting up a Radio Station: Server, Source & Listeners.
Servers: The ones who receive the audio streams from the Source and broadcast them to the Listeners.
Sources: The ones who create the audio streams and push them to the Server. RJ & DJ play their creative role out here.
Listener: The ones who register to the server for the audio streams. Musiz Lovers freaks out here.After knowing about architecture, let’s start our dig for radio tools. Based on my quick search, I found two free radio station servers – Icecast and SHOUTcast . They are very popular and highly voted. They provide support for various players like Winamp, Real player, VLC, Windows media player and others. As far as I read, I understood that if it is Linux, vote for Icecast and if it’s for Windows, go for SHOUTcast. However, I would suggest you to go through the respective websites to know more.
With Windows in mind, I have gone for SHOUTcast. So going forward, I would be talking about SHOUTcast and how to set up the server and source. To talk about the SHOUTcast, it is the product developed by the Nullsoft Inc., the maker of the famous player, Winamp. The site www.shoutcast.com provides very detailed information on its product and is well documented.
Software Required:
- SHOUTcast Distributed Network Audio Server (DNAS)- www.shoutcast.com/download/serve.phtml
- SHOUTcast source
- Winamp player
Setting up Radio Server:
- Install the server
- The installation package comes with both GUI & Console interface. For ease usage, let’s go for GUI.
- Once server is been setup, one can edit the server configuration by clicking “Edit Config” and I guess others are self explanatory.
The “Edit Config” button pops up the config file for the server. Just make sure that your port for this server doesn’t clash with other in your machine J. The server also provides restriction over the number of listeners. Just play with other config values. Read the “readme.txt”. It was really informative.That’s it. You got your server running. Top of it, the server also provides the web interface of its server.
Setting up Source (DJ! Hit d Musiz): This is the interesting part … again its simple. We gonna seek the help of Winamp. All one have to do is setup the Source plug-in to winamp. Got some screen shot for you. Well if you see, you have option for giving the server name, port & the source password (you could find it in the Config file of the server). On the other end, you could a fancy name for your station, your station URL, Genre and many more.The Encoder section provides you the facility to define the bandwidth. CPU usage of the DNAS is very low and I guess one can broadcast 24kbps on a single 300 MHz processor to over 600 listeners.
Moving forward, the input section provides the interesting feature – Switching between the inputs; Yup, from winamp (i.e. music) to sound card input. You can switch to sound card and you can host your program. Just make sure have a good mic with you and enjoy talking. Just a quick note… I was facing an issue while shifting the input mode when my music is being played. So the work around is to pause the current song and then you do the shifting of the input mode. However, other tools also hold plug-in for it to be a source to the SHOUTcast servers. There are some fancy & professional RJ tools out in the market which can help you to tune your RJ skills.
Setting up a listener: Last but not the least, if you are the listener who wants to have good time hearing to mind blowing music eing played @ your favorite stations, all you have to do is to play the play list been offered @ these servers. If you could scroll up to the web interface screen shot, the internal web interface provides a link “Listen”. It provides a “.pls” file and the listener has to play it to tune into the station.
That’s all what I got for you all DJs, RJs & Musiz Lovers! Watch out for more interesting stuffs lining up.