So, the other night when I was using my notebook in bed, there was one thing that was missing...
Music.
There was no easy way to access my MP3s sitting on the hard drive on my primary home system.
So, since things are a little slow work-wise right now, I did some research yesterday on setting up streaming audio.
Since my primary home system is Windows based, I decided to place the streaming media server on it, rather than on my Linux system. Fortunately, I found a wonderful resource for information on setting up the server, as well as background information, on this WebMonkey page.
The instructions in the tutorial were pretty good, although both the WebMonkey instructions and some of the instructions on the ShoutCast site were a little dated. The download of the ShoutCast server now contains both the server .exe and the GUI interface, so only one download is necessary.
The DJ portion of the ShoutCast site is also a little confusing - it seems to imply that you must use WinAmp v2, but the link takes you to the WinAmp v5 download. Turns out that the DSP download on the DJ portion works fine in WinAmp v5. It would have also been nice if there had been a little more detail regarding the configuration of the DSP plug-in - especially a hint that on the output tab, you need to click on the yellow pages button to name the server.
Once the server is installed and running, and WinAmp and the DSP are configured, actually streaming the files is just a simple matter of playing a playlist just as if you were just listening to songs locally.
The one big downside to using the setup is that you have to be at the server PC to create / manage the playlist that will be streamed, which somewhat hampers listening spontaneity. I can use PC remote control to access the "console" so I don't have to actually move my lazy butt, but being able to control the playlist via a browser would be ideal.
There are a number of Linux based solutions that do provide browser based playlist control. I'd be very surprised if I ever bother to set things up on the Linux server to do this, but it's nice to know that the option exists if I am ever really bored.
Since I wanted to have a reasonable level of fidelity in the music I was listening to, I configured the ShoutCast server to stream at 128 k. Since I am only worried about serving one or at most two users, and I have plenty of bandwidth at home, I figured why not.
Of course after doing all of this work, I realized that if I am streaming at 128 k, one of the primary motivations for streaming - to reduce bandwidth consumption on the LAN relative to playing the files locally from a network share - was a non-issue. So, since I have much easier control over what I chose to listen to from my local instance of WinAmp, I am now just selecting the playlist through a network fileshare. Oh well, it was an interesting learning experience...
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Posted by David at January 27, 2004 10:27 AM | Categorized under: A day in the life, Reference