Running My Own Radio Station
A friend of mine is a DJ, and he was recently asking me about what it takes to setup your own online radio station. It turns out maybe not so much.
The Research
I already have a couple of servers, which in this case is useful, but you can also start a radio station directly from a laptop! I spent some time researching the open source software available for this sort of thing. It seems that there are a couple parts you need to be successful. The first is the streaming software which take a source and then make it available to the many listeners. It looks like this is normally decoupled because the source for the streams can be many separate forms. It could be a folder of mp3s on disk, or it could be iTunes on a laptop miles away.
From what I have found thus far icecast2 is the ticket for streaming to users. This would be the first piece of software I mentioned above. It’s more heavy duty, it allows having many separate streams going all at once, even various encodings of the same source in case you have user’s that need one form of stream type or another. It comes with a simple web application UI which allows for installing it on a server somewhere, then logging in and managing things.
For the second piece of software, the source, I went with Nicecast. It’s done well and runs on Mac OS X. It can take the audio from any single application, or all audio on your machine. It’s free if you use it for less than an hour at a time!
The Install
So I rooted into my Ubuntu server and did an apt-cache search icecast. I was happy to find icecast2 listed. Next came the apt-get install and I was off. I simply edited the /etc/icecast2/ config file to change the passwords to make them not each to hack; oh I also changed the port. Then I edited the /etc/default/icecast2 file to enable the software. Last I started it with /etc/init.d/icecast2 start (well I had to open the port on the firewall this failed at first)
I was ready to broadcast. I went into the Nicecast setup for servers (command-2 is the shortcut) and I put an entry in for my server. I used the username source and password for source I entered into the config file. I setup Nicecast to use iTunes. I hit start broadcasting and I was rocking!
To test it all out I download XiiaLive Lite for my Android phone. It’s a really snazzy looking app that’ll let you consume your streams anywhere you are!!! I put in a favorite for my stream and after a few seconds I started hearing the music from my MacbookPro. I am really surprised how easy it all was.