Streaming Audio / DJing

I notice a large portion of the community uses Live 365 for streaming audio and DJ'ing.

I was curious if there was a reason this was used over some of the other (better / Free) options out there and if there are folks out there using some of those other options.

If so, what ones and what kind of success do you have?
How many users, what kind of pipe do you have feeding it?

I'm wanting to make do w. my 1.5M but if I need to hook it to a T3 I can.

Thanks for any input and if any of you feel the urge to discuss it beyond here feel free to IM me in game.

Part of the reason that I've naturally gravitated toward Live365 is that I don't have to maintain squat on my end save for the Shoutcast server on my secondary machine and can keep my bandwidth mostly free for my other rambling interests. Now, this all hinges on getting the damned Shoutcast thing to work, but I'm confident that with enough trial and error I will figure it out.

While Live365 can be a pain in the ass because of the login requirements, they have very stable service. I used them on and off when they first came out, but finally bought the bullet and purchased a basic station.

Higbee Protagonist's thread (linked elsewhere in this forum) looks like it has the best chance to help those who are a little more DJ-saavy than myself. I'm still working on it.

L365 has also properly negotiated deals with the copyright regulators, so part of your fee goes towards paying artists' royalties, which is *very* important.

I've used Live365 as well as several diffrent services. Live365.com is a very stable, and easy to use service that allows both On Demand streaming as well as Live Streaming.

As far as second life and live365 goes, It does pose a bit of an issue if you want to continously stream a live365 station on your land, as opposed to having your listeners connect through the liv365 site. You can stream it on your plot of land, however, due to the way they deal with user sessions, your station will stop running after a session reaches it's maximum time limit. Then you will have to do some legwork and paste a new link on your plot of land. If your strictly using it for live events, this is not as much of an issue because the session duration is definitely more than 3 hours. Alternately, you can post it in your event listing and have them connect directly through the live365 website. users are required to sign up for a free live365 user account.

Two other services that i have used that i really like are spacialaudio.com as well as egihosting.com. EGI HOSTING runs about $37 bucks per month and the lower end plan allots you a max of 20 user connections at 64K music stream. They offer two diffrent types of plans, On Demand, and Live.
Spacialaudio.com is my favorite at the moment for several reasons. They have a host of great broadcaster tools that interface with your shoutcast server and is very affordable. The cost is aprox. 25 bucks per month for 20 max users at 64k. With these services, you are responsible for ensuring that copywrite laws are respected, as well as royalties are paid to the artists.

Hope this helps. If anyone needs any questions answered regarding in world streaming, dont hesitate to IM me in game by name.

Good Morning,

I'm pretty much a newby here but I've been using Shoutcast with relative ease. Just type in the url and the music plays. Occasionally a station will sound fuzzy - almost everytime that has happened it's because i wasn't paying attention and picked the lowest bandwidth one. The ones on 56k and higher streams all seem to be ok for the most part and everyone has been telling me what good music I have.

I do listen to them in my winamp before logging into SL and plugging them in. If it sounds good in my winamp, it's been sounding good in SL. I don't DJ. I dont think that shoutcast has that option but I don't need it so it's working great for me as it is and.... it's FREE.

SolarStarz

lol man I have gone through many trials and errors with this whole process. I originally signed up with live365 because we were going to djing and broadcasting and SL did not have the ability to do so. Unfortunately no matter which way I went about it I had to use a Shoutcast server. Broadcasting a live feed to live365, receiving a transmission from live365, then Shoutcasting the transmission kills my bandwidth. As anyone whom came to the Underground will tell you many people would get super-static feeds. If you can broadcast, from a REAL shoutcast server than live365 is the way to go. It's cheaper in the long run due to the payment options, and as Kei said, the rights are distributed on their end and you have nothing to deal with.

The other side of the coin...

If you are never going to live DJ, or only say something every hour, or just want a station ID, the best thing to do is just broadcast direct from Winamp through your home ShoutCast server. All of the tools to do this are completely free. You can live DJ music, you just can't have RealTime microphone interaction. The plugins that supposedly do this do NOT work, don't bother trying heh. If they fix em I'll let you know =)

However, if you want audio just record from your mic through Windows Sound Recorder in the correct format, then just drop it into your playlist. It works really well and the interaction is only a few seconds off really. So in theory, you can live DJ in this fashion. And man it's nice to have less steps lol

A shoutcast server can be just another computer of just about any sort of PC, even old ones (I do not know the details for MAC, sorry). You can get a good 32 streams at 64kbps with a P2 350 =) (provided it's not busy doing something else =)). You can run a shoutcast server on the same as your SL, but your performance is going to be terrible.

The last step in the process is finding out your computer's IP and putting it into your land's streaming audio URL with the port number; like so: http://84.25.10.4:8000

For the pieces you need and more info just go to:
http://www.shoutcast.com

I hope this info helps. There was another thread I wrote with full instructions how to put the 2 together Goodwrench but I dunno where it went heh. If anybody has further q's, I will try to answer them in-world if you IM me.

are you back yet Kei!?!?!? We miss u! Or atleast I do =D

Yeah, I gave up too. I still have my Live365 station... I was gonna bail on it but got some surprisingly positive feedback.

But screw them: It's all about SL. So I'll figure things out eventually, but I couldn't even get the damned shoutcast/winamp thing to work on my dedicated PC. I need to woo some local geek with promises of Cheetos and Mountain Dew or something...