I am thinking of setting up Internet radio via software such as Pirate Radio or Streamer. I have read tutorials for both and, short of just staggering through and seeing if it works (and accepting that it probably won't work except by accident), I'm still not clear about EXACTLY what I need. Can anyone help?
Hello karldallas
The free software provided by shoutcast.com makes it possible to get streaming fairly easily. Their software is based around the free Winamp player, its playlist, and a plugin which converts mp3 files to the streaming format and which passes the signal on to a free server software that turns your home computer into a server. The upstream bandwidth of your internet service is important, because it limits the number of listeners you can serve.
The biggest roadblock for me was discovering that "port forwarding" was involved, but there's a link provided by shoutcast to, I think, portforward.com which explains how do get it done.
Now that you've mention Pirate Radio and Streamer I'll look into those out of curiosity.
Streamer is a pretty nice package which uses a peer-to-peer system to reduce overall bandwidth. Like Pirate Radio, you have to use Streamer to listen to Streamer broadcasts.
It uses port 8466 to communicate with other copies of Streamer. But you use port 8000 to send data to the master Streamer. That means it's fairly easy to use Winamp or other automation package with the app. Streamer will work with MP3 and Ogg encoding.
I ran a Streamer set up for a couple of years and I thought it was great. Users of all skill levels, as well as the author himself, regualrly provide help to beginners on the Streamer forum, so it's one of the most well supported P2P streaming applications. I exchanged info and got help from people all around the world, it's truly a global product because it's so light weight.
I have successfully used Streamer on an old PC with WIN98, 200 MHz processor and 80 MB of RAM and streamed over a dial-up connection, so I know it will run on almost anything!