Need information on how i can set a web radio station (low budget)?

Question

Technical info
cost?
free servers?

Answer 1

A good start point is to go into the technologies: shoutcast and linux.

A web radio station needs a decent bandwidth in order to serve many listeners, as each stream is discounted from you UPLOAD bandwidth, i.e. if your connection to the internet is 512 kbps to download and 256 kbps to upload, you will have only the 256 kbps for your listeners. If you decide to broadcast in 96 kbps, you willbe able to serve only 4 listeners simultaneously, but you can set your broadcast bandwith to a lesser figure (down to 8 kbps) if needded or convenient. A way to overcome this limitation is to use a service for streaming hosting.

You will also need a public IP address for your streaming server.This is because only a public IP can be "tuned" or seen from all over the world. You can ask your ISP if he is capable of giving it to you, most do.

Back to the server, the server can be a regular computer, P4 with 512 RAM will do fine. We used shoutcast server (free) runing on linux ubuntu (free, not the best flavor of linux for a server but it does the job) but you can downoad fedora or redhat.

Here you run two programs, an encoder program and a server program (both downloded from the shoutcast site), and you can set the encoder program to work based on a list of audio files, or you can set it to use the line in of the computer's audio card, being capable of having an external mixer/another computer to program the music.

email me if you need more help.

Answer 2

Go to live365.com, and they have the facilities to help you get started as a broadcaster.