question regarding music and shoutcast servers...

right, I might be in a club and theres no music playing, I might have a good song that I might want to play but I can't because its impossilble to upload it! I click file and select "bulk upload" and select the song from winAMP but it says it cannot upload the file! how do I fix this?

also, where can I find a list of shoutcast servers?

Why upload the song ? Just play it locally.


http://www.shoutcast.com would be a good start.

and how would I play it locally?

You can't "magically broadcast" on to the radio stream in someone's land in that manner - SL radio broadcasting is entirely seperate to the "upload a sound file" thing in the menu. You need a suitable Shoutcast plugin for winamp (or use a seperate Radio Automation program entirely), plus knowledge of their Shoutcast server, including the Broadcast Password.

If you want to run a music stream of your own, you'll either need to use someone else's Shoutcast server, or hire one of your own. There's a vast range of service providers in this market - google "shoutcast hosting" to get started. I'm pretty sure there's even some SL peeps who will provide this for you and take payment in L$.

Depending on the club, maybe you could ask them to install a multi-user radio switcher, so you can swap the land over to your shoutcast stream when you're DJing, then return it to some other channel afterwards. That would rely on you being on pretty good terms with the club's owners, though.

Just play it in winamp or whatever media player you have.

It's also not too difficult to set up a shoutcast server. You can run it on the same machine your run SL as long as you're not trying to broadcast to a ton of people. On a mid-level computer I was able to stream to 8-10 people while still running SL on the same machine. When I got a new computer that machine became a dedicated shoutcast server.

Streaming ability is more a function of your upstream bandwidth than it is of your computer speed. When we were testing streaming at the Cutlass Club, I ran an Icecast server on my local Linux gateway box, connected to a cable modem. With three people listening, I started seeing noticeable effects on my SL performance. I doubt I could have hosted many more listeners and still been able to function in SL.

This is why we went with a Live365.com server for the club DJs. When I'm broadcasting, I only need one upstream connection to feed every listener in the club. It works admirably well. Come by this evening and check it out for yourself; I'll be spinning there starting at 6:00.

How do you get around the Live365 login? I could never get it to work with my Live365 station because it would see each connection as being logged in under the same username and password and would invalidate the stream. Maybe it works different with live relay streams than it does with basic mode broadcasts (my station runs in basic). Sometimes I'll relay my Live365 station through Shoutcast.

When I was running Shoutcast and SL on the same machine it was through a Comcast cable connection with 512mb of ram on the machine (ram seems to be the other limiter). I could comforably serve 8 listeners, as long as I didn't need to move at all in SL hehe.

We use our server in Live mode, with the Live Broadcaster client, and we pay for having 30 simultaneous live streams. (I figure we'll have to get pretty damn popular to exceed that mark. )

Okay, so it must work differently in live/relay mode. I'll keep relaying through Shoutcast when I want to annoy people with my 8 hour shuffle playlist, hehe.