![]() ![]() Next, click Add Encoder to add a new entry ( Vorbis: Quality 0/Stereo/44100) in the box below, and double-click the new entry to configure it. You can test this yourself by clicking on the sound-level meter to activate it, playing some music through Winamp, and toggling the mic off and on to see whether each input is working. Just click the mic picture to enable or disable the mic when the mic is disabled, Edcast will use Winamp for its input. Here you can set Edcast to use either your microphone jack or your Winamp playlist. Grab the Edcast Winamp plugin, open Winamp, go to Options, Preferences, Plug-ins, DSP/Effect, select edcast DSP v3, and click Configure active plugin. ![]() Now that your stream server is running, you need to give it something to stream. Save the icecast.xml doc (in the root icecast2 directory, usually C:/Program Files/icecast2), and click Start Server in Icecast2’s main window. Remember, you’ll probably need to open this port in your firewall in order for your radio station to work. The ‘port’ tag refers to the port you’d like to use to stream the music.Otherwise, you can find your outside IP address at. If you want to broadcast only to your network, use your internal network’s IP address. For the ‘hostname’ tag, enter your IP address.The ‘relay-password’ and ‘admin-password’ tags aren’t important for this how-to, but change them from the default ‘hackme’ anyway.For the ‘source-password’ tag, enter the password you want to use for your stream app (Edcast).For the ‘sources’ tag, enter the maximum number of listeners you want your station to have.This will open a text document called ‘icecast.xml’, which you’ll have to tweak a bit. ![]() If you want to run your own server, download and install Icecast2, open the app, and select Edit Configuration from the Configuration menu. Icecast2 configuration screen.If you opt for a dedicated streaming server, make sure that you know the host’s IP address or URL, the correct port number, the stream password, the server type (usually it’s either Shoutcast or Icecast2), and the maximum bitrate (if applicable) before moving on. I recommend signing up for a dedicated radio server: The cost is far less than what you’d pay for a home Internet connection (which for practical purposes you wouldn’t be able to use for anything else), and such servers are slightly easier to configure. One such server,, invites you to broadcast a 128-kbps stream to up to 1000 users at no charge–and the ads stay out of your audio stream (instead, they get displayed on the Web page you use to advertise your station). But some free Shoutcast radio servers rely on ads to pay the bills. ![]() Shoutcast server configuration screen.Typically, you have to pay for a dedicated radio server the rates start at about $6 per month and increase as your radio station’s traffic grows. Also, you don’t have to monopolize your Internet connection to keep up your radio station, since you’re sending a single stream to the server, which then handles each listener with its own broadband connection. If you use that approach, your broadband connection needs to strong enough to send out one stream to the dedicated server–but it doesn’t have to be any stronger. You can use your PC to play the music with Winamp and to source it with Edcast, and then send the stream over the Internet to a dedicated radio stream server equipped with a high-bandwidth connection. For talk radio, it would probably be fine but for music, it might sound as though songs were being transmitted over a phone.įortunately, the stream server doesn’t have to live on the same PC as the audio source. I could lower the quality of the feed to, say, 96 kbps, but then the audio quality of my stream would be significantly worse. My home DSL’s upstream speeds tops out at about 500 kbps (about 50 KBps), and a high-quality MP3 feed requires at least 192 kbps, so I’d be able to accommodate only two listeners and I’d barely be able to do anything with my Internet connection. If you’re hosting the station on a home PC with a typical cable or DSL connection, your upstream speeds probably aren’t great. ![]()
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