My System Build - Internet Radio

Carskick · February 14, 2004, 19:48 hrs

I spent the later half of today setting up my own internet radio station. If you like modern rock/hard rock, and have broadband, listen here:

The Ultimate Rock Station

I originally hosted it from my computer, but it took system resources, etc., so I pulled my old K6 out of the attic. I put it on a shelf under my scanner and hooked it up with a power cable, a spare mouse, and a spare keyboard. I used my comp's monitor and switched them back and forth. The K6 was giving me errors, so I reformatted it. It seemed fine, but glitches and errors continued. I did a mem test and returned over 42000 errors by test 4. So I pulled out a stick of RAM, which fixed it. It only has 64 MB of RAM - 4MB for the integrated video, but it's sufficent as an internet radio server. I got it all setup, transfered my music to it, and now I have my own Internet Radio Station. Check it out, and give me feedback. Thanks!

Carskick · February 14, 2004, 22:30 hrs

I'm in a delema right now. When I originally poasted, I was broadcasting at 128kbps mono. I realized that mono doesn't require that much so I lowered it to 96kbps mono. The sound quality is no different, which is good, but I can allow more people to connect to my station. I want to allow as many people to connect to my station as possible with my limited home connection while providing very high sound quality.

MP3 is my only option, so which encoding format should I use?

I could stick with my current 96kbps mono, which has good quality, but lacks the depth of stereo,

I could go down to 80 or 64kbps mono, which may lower sound quality, but would allow more people to conncect to me.

I could go to 96kbps stereo, which may not have as high sound quality but would have more depth.

Or I could use 128kbps stereo ,which would sound the best, but greatly limit the number of people who can connect to my station.

What would you choose? Thanks.

scuzzy · February 15, 2004, 10:55 hrs

I have absolutely no advice for you, but I think it's pretty cool. :) Hope it works out, but it looks like you're off to a good start.

Carskick · February 15, 2004, 16:31 hrs

Thank you.

Carskick · February 16, 2004, 12:40 hrs

Well, I just finished the start of my station's website. You can see it here.

http://members.fortunecity.com/carskick/main.html.

I design it from scratch with little html experience. I used html teaching websites to help as I went. What do you guys think? I'd like to mak in fancier, maybe put a guest book or forum in it, but I have no idea how. I was wondering if anybody here would be willing to help me with my site? I'd be volenteer work, as I have no money going in our out as far as this station goes. You would be given the proper gratitude on the site, of course. Thanks!

saoirse · February 23, 2004, 15:22 hrs

I think it sounds good! :o

I get awful quality from our radio station online. The site's easy to navigate. You've done a good job ;) What's with all the Nickelback stuff though?!

You can find open source code for guest books/forums (commonly in perl).

Try http://www.planet-source-code.com

Carskick · February 25, 2004, 15:35 hrs

There are only 2 Nickelback songs, but I'm glad you enjoyed my station and site. I'm going to try and setup a forum or guestbook using code from that site if I can find it. Thanks for your help!

Carskick · February 25, 2004, 16:59 hrs

Hmm, I went to that site and poked around, but there isn't any html code that I could find. Do I use another programing language's code, or what? I guess I'm still looking for some forum/guestbook code.

saoirse · February 25, 2004, 17:34 hrs

Yah. Forums and guestbooks are beyond the scope of HTML.

Here's a forum which you could use, in Perl.

http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=346&lngWId=6.

saoirse

Carskick · February 26, 2004, 15:13 hrs

That looks good, but how do I implicate this onto my website. I am using fortune city as a server. Thanks for the help!

saoirse · February 29, 2004, 09:28 hrs

Sorry for the delay.

The website http://perlcoders.com should give you some tips.

You'll need to check if Fortune City allows the use of the Perl language (code and CGI scripts). Being a free service, you may be out of luck. Forums are often in PHP (poasters), Perl, or a Java applet + a CGI script.

Take a look at Jive. It's 100% Java, which Fortune City should support.

Let me know how ya get on.

saoirse

Carskick · March 02, 2004, 16:14 hrs

Well, I looked at Jive, and there are two problems. One, it costs. My radio station is more of a cheap hobby, that only costs me my K6's resources and some of my bandwidth. I did download Jive just to see how it would work, and I came to another problem. I didn't understand how to set it up. They explained it as making a war file then use this to send it to the server, etc., and since I'm inexperienced with websites and JAVA, it went over my head. So maybe my site just wasn't meant to have a forum. Oh well. Thanks for trying Saoirse. If you have any other ideas, please, let me know.

trav · March 04, 2004, 18:04 hrs

Carskick, where do i go to listen? :-[

Mark H · March 04, 2004, 18:32 hrs

Quote from: Travis F on March 04, 2004, 18:04 hrs
Carskick, where do i go to listen? :-[

Click the link in his first message and then click "listen" at the top of the page.

Mark H

Carskick · March 06, 2004, 18:26 hrs

Yeah, what Mark said. You'll probably need to download winamp if you don't have it.

Forum Update: I found instructions on how to make a forum using PHP, but Fortune City didn't support PHP. Sick of Fortune City's shortcommings, I began searching the web for a better free host. That was whe I stumbled on a free premade form hosting site called Invastion Power Board @ ForumHoster.com

It is exactly what I needed for my radio station and Warcraft 3 clan. I kept fortune city as my stations main site and linked the forum to it. It is pretty easy to setup once you get use to the interface, and so far, I am very happ with it. Thanks for all the help.

If you want to go check it out, go to http://members.fortunecity.com/carskick/main.html and click forum. If you'd like to participate, you can register and talk away!

Thunderdog · March 07, 2004, 11:00 hrs

Hey carsick, do you have site stats for how many people listen to your station?

Ive SEEN 56 k hookups. Is that next?

Very cool!

Carskick · March 09, 2004, 14:42 hrs

Yes. When I you go to my website, you can click station stats, and that will tell how many people have listened to my station since it's been on. It's never on overnight, so that's a daily figure.

I doubt I'm going to add 56k hookups because I don't have enough bandwidth to support both high quality and low quality stations. If someone wanted to pay for a server to host it for me, I'd be happy to. :)

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My System Build - Internet Radio