What live audio streaming software do you recommend?

February 26, 2004 11:56 AM

Seeking recommendations: What software I can use to broadcast live, on-location streaming audio to the Web without a lot of painful configuration and thumb-twisting?

I'm a solo guitarist, and a lot of the places I've been playing at are starting to offer free wireless Internet access. So now I have this crazy idea that I could use my iBook to broadcast my performances live on the Web. The problem is that most of the software I've looked into requires things like open firewall ports, static IPs, etc. and there's no way the people who manage the local CoffeeHaus are gonna agree to do that. So, are there other options?

Bonus points if it works on OS X, but I'll take Windows options too. It doesn't have to be a free solution either, although that'd be swell. Ideally, I'd like listeners to be able to use Winamp or something similar to listen.
posted by scottandrew to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

If you had your own server running somewhere that you could VPN into from your iBook over the wireless connection then you would have a much better setup anyway, since you would only be sending one stream out of the laptop instead of one for each person wanting to hear it. I think Quicktime Streaming Server would be as good a tool as any for both sending the stream from the laptop to the server, and running on the server to broadcast to the world.
posted by Space Coyote at 12:08 PM on February 26, 2004

Not sure if this is what you are thinking of, but I hear it is good and easy to set up:

http://www.tunesatwork.com/
posted by terrapin at 1:44 PM on February 26, 2004

You might take a look at Icecast.
posted by thebabelfish at 1:53 PM on February 26, 2004

Response by poster: Icecase and TunesAtWork are both good suggestions, but both require that I open a port, and like I said above, it's unlikely that the cafe owner will allow me to do that (it's also likely that they won't know how).

Are there services which would allow me to upstream the audio to a remote server and have it broadcast from there in real time? That'd be a lot easier.
posted by scottandrew at 2:22 PM on February 26, 2004

Shoutcast (as in Winamp) lets you upstream the audio to a remote server, which then rebroadcasts it. You just connect to the same server address as any of your listeners, but with an admin password, and then you can set the playlist.

I don't know what kind of tweaking you'd have to do in order to use a live audio source. But chances are good that somebody's written a plugin for it.
posted by Aaorn at 3:14 PM on February 26, 2004

maybe nato ?
posted by amberglow at 4:08 PM on February 26, 2004

There are plenty of line-in and mic plugins for Winamp. Just search on www.winamp.com.
posted by armoured-ant at 7:32 PM on February 26, 2004

Quicktime Broadcaster?
posted by jeremias at 8:30 PM on February 26, 2004