Music Servers

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Something like this?

This may help also

With so many stations available on internet radio, either directly from the station's website or through iTunes, why would you want to do it any other way?

The local outlet store had some of these last year... Apparently they were not big sellers.

Winamp with Shoutcast and you have probably a good 90% of every radio station on the planet at your finger tips these days.

I suspected as much. All I can find seem to require storing your source material on a hard drive :-( ...Jim Thompson

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

You're looking for a standalone box rather than something that uses a PC with sound card, right?

If so, I haven't seen anything really suitable -- I'm looking for the same thing. I've even toyed with the idea of building one, but realistically you'd want it to be compatible with, e.g., your Roku Soundbridge there (and I'd want it to work with my Logitech Squeezebox stuff), and to do that you need an MP3 (or similar) *encoder* in the box. Now, that's easy to do with a PC (there's a very good, freely-available MP3 encoder called LAME available), but with a little standalone "network accessible brick," typically their processors (often low-end ARMs) don't have the floating-point unit that LAME wants... and -- interestingly enough -- there are very few freely-available fixed-point MP3 encoders out there, and the ones that do exist (e.g., one called SHINE) are rather poor compared to LAME.

There are commercially-available fixed-point MP3 encoders, but apparently no one seems to think the market is big enough to support this more traditional approach.

At least that's my analysis of why standalone "feed in analog audio here, spit out MP3/Shoutcast-encoded audio over Ethernet there" boxes don't seem to exist.

I'd love to find out I'm wrong about that, though.

Someone will likely point out that you can pick up netbooks for all of ~$200 or so at times, and that would work just ducky to run LAME and perform this function -- although you still have to install and configure all the software yourself.

---Joel

Same here. You'd think that would be a desirable product. But I guess markets are driven by the iPhone crowd... they can't even walk down the street without being glued to the Web :-(

...Jim Thompson

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Yep!

Would the netbook approach work for you, assuming the appropriate software was already installed and configured?

Yes. ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Some are so glued that they walk right into a mall fountain...

VLC (Video Lan Client) should be able to do this. Works in linux or Windows. Assigning an ip adress will be up to your router, unless you're running linux and can edit the necessary .rc file.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

I think you can do that with 'Windows Media Encoder'

Audio IN --> WME --> Network Stream

See

Cheers

Thanks, Martin, I'll give that a try. ...Jim Thompson

I don't know of one 'put together' but you should be able to do it with winamp and either their shoutcast server or icecast.

For Winamp you need the shoutcast-dsp-2-1-1-windows.exe plugin, which takes the audio and streams it to the shoutcast-dnas-1-9-8-windows.exe server.

Files here:

Short 'howto' here:

Forget the stuff about needing IIS. That's BS.

I'm streaming audio with shoutcast to my other PCs as I type.

You'll probably want a standalone box or at least not associate Winamp with audio files because if you tried to play any locally though it they would override the playlist and go into the broadcast stream.

I did test sound card input with a mic and that went out too but as a side note for testing: I don't know if my setup is 'odd' or normal but by the time everything gets finished with doing whatever it does there's an up to 60 second delay before audio makes it out the speakers on the other end so don't give up too fast (server buffering I presume).

Oh, and use 'legacy' server for the winamp DSP connection if using the shoutcast-dnas-1-9-8 server with a GUI interface (the V2 server is command line only).

Hello, and I've appliances here at work that are capable of streaming MPEG-4 video and audio. They are made by VBrick Systems but they cost several thousand dollars each. You input an NTSC or PAL video source and/or the accompanying analog stereo/mono audio and the stream is output to your network. You can set parameters like bit rates for video and audio, frame rate, picture resolution, etc. You would then play the stream using a client player such as QuickTime or VLC (Out-of-the-box Windows Media player doesn't support MPEG-4). As a cheaper alternative you could use a computer with an audio grabber and freeware like VLC (configured as a server rather than client) to accomplish the same thing. If it's an Apple computer you could use the Darwin streaming server software. Sincerely,

Have you ever opened one up to see if it's running an x86 CPU? I'd say there's a very good chance they do!

Hello, and all I know for sure is that they use a VxWorks embedded RTOS. The model 4300 encoder boxes I have are a few years old and I don't know what OS/processors VBrick Systems is using in their current product line. Sincerely,

Jim Thompson wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Been using Orb for years to send TV/audio/video to troops in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan.....right from their living room back home.

Works great....

Just plug your tuner into an old computer's sound card.

=A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

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I've been using Logitech Squeezeboxes for years. However, you use the stream from the readio station itself, not your own tuner. The Squeeze Classic can be had on Craigslist for $100 or less. Logitech maintains a server to keep track of the feeds. Both my Squeeze classics are version 3, which has wifi and ethernet. I have a Squeeze Radio. I'm not convinced the firmware on that box is up to par as compared to the Squeeze classic. I occasionally have to book the Radio.

The Squeeze Classic just has spdif, toslink, and photo plugs. You need a stereo system to go with it. The Squeeze Boom and Radio have built in speaker(s). They can also stream music off your hard drive. The seerver software is Perl. It runs on windown, mac, and linux.

The Roku box has just dreadful sound.

The Squeeze Classic has Burr Brown DACs and low noise opamps. It is as good as a CD player. The Squeezebox can handle FLAC. It can also transcode on the fly to MP3 at various bit rates if you want to listen via smartphone.

Actually I have two Squeeze Classics, I keep on by the PC and the other with the stereo. The headphone amp in the classic is OK. Much better than the sound you get from a PC.

Mediafly can supposedly drive the Squeezebox hardware. I never tried that.

Thanks! I'll check into that. ...Jim Thompson