Designing Web Audio & CD-ROM

Start your own MP3 radio station

SHOUTcast is the most popular software used for streaming MP3 to the world. (MP3 streams are not saved on the user’s hard drive but are listened to as they’re downloaded.) SHOUTcast comes from Nullsoft, creators of the Winamp MP3 player. Much as HTML editors made it possible for anyone to publish text and graphics on the Web, the SHOUTcast application and server (shown in Figure 8-14) makes it possible for the masses to broadcast audio over the Internet with a minimum amount of hardware and knowledge (although a good bit of bandwidth definitely helps).

Figure 8-14. The SHOUTcast DSP plug-in for Winamp lets you redirect MP3 streams to server software for Internet distribution.

Icecast

An open source, free alternative to SHOUTcast also exists called Icecast (http://www.icecast.org). Icecast was created in 1999 by two coders, Jack Moffitt and Barath Raghavan, to provide an open source audio streaming server that anyone could modify, use, and tinker with. It was further developed under the GNU General Public License by many people scattered around the globe. The upside is if you are a programmer you can use it free of charge and alter it in any way. The downside is that Icecast is a little more difficult to configure and set up, though you may find the payoff is worth the effort.

SHOUTcast streaming technology is a distributed architecture that lets ...