DIY Internet Radio

How to make your own radio station on the Internet?

To answer this question, you first need to ask yourself why this radio station needs to be made and what it will be like. But if you have long drawn this small “business plan” in your head, then “welcome to cut” to the study of the math 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 will not be amiss to recall that the closer the address relates to the name, the easier it is to spell and the less possible incorrect variants of such spelling, the better.
Choose an address? Excellent! We order 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 (how many options I tried on Wordpress and Drupal are very difficult to come up with an implementation on these engines). I’ll tell you more about how to fill content and tricks in implementation in the following articles.

Battle server

Yes, it was not by chance that I wrote earlier that hosting is needed for the site, because every kilobit of speed will be on the account of the broadcasting server on our account, and to “eat out” this most important resource for us is an unacceptable luxury.
And now a simple formula that will hurt us in the future:
Пропускная способность канала/качество вещания=количество одновременных слушателей.
In other words, if our Internet channel is 100Mb / s, and we plan to broadcast on a quality of 128Kb / s, then only 800 people will fit (believe me, this is a very large audience for a beginner project) .

Which server to choose?

Over this issue, I rummaged for hours on the Internet in search of a solution and the solution was not long in coming. A 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 correction - the speed is divided by all the inhabitants of this physical machine, which means that 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, when choosing a server, what kind of operating system it will have is not. Solutions for deploying a radio server are available for both Win 32/64 and * nix. I just note that when implemented on Windows you will have more options, and on Linux it will be cheaper to maintain.

IceCast2 or ShoutCast

The heart of our server is the broadcast. It is to her that all the audio streams are connected, both incoming and outgoing. And here you need to make an informed choice, because the whole further broadcasting system and its support will be built on this. Both products have all the charms that are needed to organize the broadcast. Both products are cross-platform and require specific skills in communicating with configuration files, fortunately, they are accompanied by impressive documentation (in English).

Configuring the "broadcast"

Each radio station requires very specialized settings. In the configurations, names, stream parameters, switching rules, security, etc. are indicated. After setting up, do not forget to set an exception in the firewall for the port on which broadcasting is performed.

Sound broadcast

There are 3 ways to apply sound to a channel:

• Relay
• Auto broadcaster
• Live stream

Moreover, the last two differ from each other only in that one is a robot (or broadcasting is carried out according to a pre-prepared sheet), and the second is a living person.
But with Rayleigh, everything is more interesting. Let's look at all the ways:

Relay is the forwarding point. She takes the ready-made link of the radio station and distributes it to everyone who connects to it. Thus, having such a relay, you can relay radio stations to local networks, hammer in the empty time of your broadcasts and expand the bandwidth of your own radio station. (more about 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 do not have very powerful server resources, and the change of leaders occurs very often.

Auto Broadcaster and Live Stream - quite a lot of programs are suitable for this role, but I will highlight the most common ones:
Windows

• Radioboss
• Samroadroadcaster
• Winamp + ShoutCast plugin

Linux

• Ices
• phpCast
• PulseAudio *

(*) - PulseAudio server has built-in audio stream transfer mechanisms

Summary:

In this article, I described the key points in creating Internet radio.
The installation and configuration of the radio server itself takes no more than 15 minutes. Much more time is spent on debugging certain functions, because manually monitor the status of the project 24 hours a day is impossible.

Links to articles and guides on the topic:

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

Afterword

In the following articles I will describe in detail all the tricks in installing, configuring and using each of these elements of Internet radio, I will give examples of configuration scripts and automation methods.