Online radio do it yourself

How to make your radio station on the Internet?

To answer this question, you first need to ask yourself why you need to do this radio station and what it will be like. But if you have already drawn this small “business plan” in your head, then “welcome under the cat” to study the mat part.

Facing the people

The face of any Internet project is its page on the Internet. Armed with a WHOIS service, we are looking for a beautiful and simple address for the site. It would not be superfluous to remind you that the closer the address belongs to the name, the simpler its spelling and the fewer possible incorrect variants of such spelling, the better.
Chose an address? Fine! We are ordering hosting.
For the successful operation of the site we need 3 simple things:

• Php
• SQL base
• Engine

About the engine:
Here everyone has the right to choose what suits him best, but I note right away that Joomla will be the best for the implementation of the site (I didn’t touch up the options on Wordpress and Drupal - it’s very hard to come up with an implementation on these engines). In more detail about ways of filling with content and tricks in implementation I will tell in the following articles.

Battle Server

Yes, I did not accidentally write earlier that a website needs hosting, because on the combat broadcast server we will have every kilobit of speed in our account, and “eating away” by showing the contents of this most important resource for us is an unaffordable luxury.
And now a simple formula that will overwhelm our eyes in the future:
/ = .
In other words, if our Internet channel is 100Mb / s, and we plan to broadcast on quality at 128Kb / s, then there will only be 800 people (believe me, this is a very large audience for a beginner project).
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Which server to choose?

Above this question, I spent hours surfing the Internet in search of a solution, and the solution was not long in coming. Virtual server is the best choice in this situation.
First: By default, it has a static IP address.
Secondly: It has a fairly high-speed connection, though with one small amendment - the speed is divided into all the inhabitants of this physical machine, which means our 800 people can be safely divided by 5 (although it is possible that this figure will be very different, because the load to other servers can also be quite high).
Our research does not require a powerful processor and a lot of RAM. The configuration of the radioserver allows you to successfully use negligible resources, our main selection criterion is the connection speed.

Windows or Linux

As such, the choice of the server is what the operating system will not have. Solutions for deploying a radio server are available for Win 32/64 and * nix. Just note that when implemented on Windows, you will have more options, and under Linux - cheaper in content.

IceCast2 or ShoutCast

The heart of our server is the “broadcaster”. It is to it that all audio streams, both incoming and outgoing, are connected. And here you need to make an informed choice, because the whole further broadcasting system and its support will be built on this. Both one and the other products have all the charms that are necessary for the organization of the ether. Both of them are cross-platform products and require certain skills in communicating with configuration files, since they are accompanied by extensive documentation.

Configuring "broadcasts"

Each radio station requires very specialized settings. Configurations include names, flow parameters, switching rules, security, and more. After setup, do not forget to set an exception in the firewall for the port on which the broadcast is made.

Sound broadcast

There are 3 ways to get the sound per channel:

• Rayleigh
• AutoVisor
• Live air

Moreover, the last two differ only by the fact that one leads the robot (or the broadcast is based on a previously prepared list), and the second is a living person.
But with Relay more interesting. Let's look at all the ways:

Relay is a transfer point. She takes a ready-made link to the radio station and distributes to everyone who connects to it. Thus, having such a relay, one can relay radio stations to local networks, clog up the empty time of their airs and expand the capacity of one’s own radio station. (Details on how to elegantly increase the capacity of one channel by 2 or more times, I will tell in the following articles). Also this point is extremely important if you have not very powerful server resources, and the change of leaders occurs very often.

Broadcaster and Live air - quite a lot of programs fit this role, but I will highlight the most common ones:
Windows

• Radioboss
• Sambroadcaster
• Winamp + ShoutCast plugin

Linux

• Ices
• phpCast
• PulseAudio *

(*) - PulseAudio server has built-in audio streaming mechanisms

Results:

In this article, I described the key points in creating Internet radio.
The installation and setup of the radio server takes no more than 15 minutes. Much more time is spent on debugging certain functions, since It is impossible to manually control the state of the project 24 hours a day.

Links to articles and guides on the topic:

RadioTalk.ru - Forum about Internet radio stations. Detailed guides, scripts and settings.
IceCast.org - Ice Cast project site.
ShoutCast.com - ShoutCast project site.

Afterword

In the following articles, I will describe in detail all the tricks to install, configure and use each of these elements of Internet radio, give examples of configuration scripts and methods of automation.