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[ThatAdamGuy]

Well, it's been an interesting 8 hours or so, as I familiarized myself with many many aspects of Shoutcasting, and trying to fit MC somewhere in there.

Here's what I've discovered so far:
- I can't actually use MC to broadcast.
- There's no free / <$20/month way to shoutcast to other people except using a server on my own DSL connection.  Ack!
- Shoutcasting/Icecasting is *NOT* easy to do with WMA files, and seemingly impossible to do with (DRM) protected WMA files.
- I can serve MP3 files using WinAmp5, but not WMA files, because the WMA serving plugin doesn't work with WinAmp5.
- And, for the MC part, I can easily drag and drop songs from MC to WinAmp with ease .

The bummers:
- I believe I will have to pay for this WMA plugin if I continue to use it, and it's not cheap! ($45 I think)
- It'd sure be nice if I could actually serve up stuff without WinAmp... just using MC and a Shoutcast server.
- I wish there was a service that'd let me shoutcast to 2-3 simultaneous listeners and charge me <$5/month for the minimal bandwidth!

Anyone else out there experimented with Shoutcasting?  I saw a few threads, but not much recent exploration.

[ThatAdamGuy]

Well, let me talk with myself, if y'all don't mind!

I've been having a blast Shoutcasting!  You are welcome to check out my station which -- due to its experimental nature -- is not guaranteed to be up, nor will I make any guarantees as to what's being featured at any given moment.  Currently, I'm broadcasting a random selection of my 6000 tracks (classical to jazz to musicals to europop to trance...) at 128kbps MP3.  

But boy, I sure wish I could use MC for broadcasting!  I wonder what would be involved in writing or adapting a plugin that'd work with MC.  It'd be so much nicer to be able to just click on playlists and BOOM, have them broadcast, and -- of equal importance -- have the pleasure of rating and tagging songs while a broadcast is going on.

---

More things I've learned from my intensive dive into Shoutcasting:

- I can broadcast WMA files for free with Shoutcast's Winamp plugin... it's just that with Shoutcast (and even the aforementioned for-pay plugin), they end up as MP3s on the receiving end.  Bummer .  In fact, I've been unable to find ANY affordable way to serve up WMA files (so that they end up as high fidelity WMAs on the receiving end, too)

- The Shoutcast plugin works on WinAmp 2.9 and Winamp 5

- I can broadcast stuff with WinAmp, turn WinAmp's volume down independently, and then listen to other music on MC with no slowdown in the broadcast or system slowdown!

- I learned that my DSL connection is actually about 330kbps upstream (I thought it was 128), so I can actually easily broadcast two 128kbps streams or four 64kbps streams!

- Well, I technically can broadcast using MC, but only by sending the full soundcard data upstream.  On the bright side, that means I can even stream secure WMA files, which is NOT possible with Winamp.  But on the downside, I also would end up streaming Windows system beeps, e-mail notification buzzers, incoming IM noises, and all.  And furthermore, unlike with normal streaming via WinAmp, no song titles would get sent .  So this isn't a very viable option.

Anyway, I can't wait 'til I can effectively broadcast with MC!  I'm already thinking of fun weekly radio shows I could do

[zevele10]

Listening to: 'Tears For Fears - Laid So Low (Tears Roll Down)' on Media Center 9.0.
So it works

[Deivit]

Listening to: 'Vivaldi - Conerto Per Violino E Archi in mi minore, F.I. no 37 - largo' on Media Center 10

Works here too  

[ThatAdamGuy]

Hey you guys, I'm really pleased you've tested this out for me!  Thanks for the replies

And continuing on in my journal of sorts here... and, actually, quite relevant to the MC world is that I fear I'm getting too complacent in my Webmastering / streaming.  That is to say, I'm taking for granted the fact that I can play so many formats with MC, and forgetting that 99% of the rest of the world does not have this glorious tool.

Specifically, I've learned that Windows Media Player WILL NOT handle the default .pls files from Shoutcast!  MusicMatch, WinAmp and iTunes will, but I'm betting that easily 80% or more of Windows folks only have what comes with their system -- Windows Media Player.

Don't get me wrong.  My point isn't that WMP is (necessarily) evil.  But rather, it's important that we as MC users (especially we folks who author or broadcast content) must keep in mind the limitations of those who do not also have MC.

Apparently, there are ways to construct the playlist file in an .asx or .m3u format that enables people with just WMP to play it, but so far I've only managed to get the rote stream to work without any song titles.  Ack!  Dang, this is consuming a lot of my time.  And for what?  Oh, geekdom... just doing stuff for the sake of figuring things out!  Aaaaaaaagh!

[zevele10]

I can tell you one thing: people using Shoutcast ARE NOT the kind of Windows Media Player addicts.

They are part of the WinAmp crowd. And MM behind WinAmp. But not W media player crows.

[ThatAdamGuy]

Definitely a good point!  In fact, pretty much anyone that is browsing on the ShoutCast site is guaranteed to have a compatible player (or soon will ).

However, I'm hoping to link my 'radio station' from my Web sites and via e-mail to my friends.  Frankly, I doubt -- given my bandwidth constraints -- that many folks browsing Shoutcast are gonna be that interested in a 3-seat station anyway.

[milehigh]

Hey Adam,

I was under the impression that you couldn't shout or ice cast with MC - how are you doing this - sending it through WA and then broadcasting?  I really would like to do this for my own use - I have an Audiotron - that I would like to broadcast playlists to from MC - without having to export it and import it into the Audiotron.  Please let me know if I am misunderstanding you.  I know how to shoutcast via the winampl plugin.  Thanks.

[modelmaker]

MC 9.0 buffers up to 76% and stops no music. Shoutcast says bitrate is 96. Do I have to have winamp installed for this to work?

BTW I do have a high speed connection.

[Tolga]

I wonder whether this technogy can be used to push music to multiple computers in a home network.

MC Server can't be used to listen the same  music in all rooms of a house in a syncronized way. (unless you have ugly cables etc.).

[ThatAdamGuy]

Milehigh, I'm sorry for not being more clear.

Yes, sadly, that's what I'm having to do... take the songs from my playlists on MC, drag and drop them into the Winamp now playing window, and then shoutcasting from Winamp.

Technically, I could shoutcast from MC by using pure soundcard output, but this'd obnoxiously capture ALL Windows sounds (system beeps, new mail sounds, etc.) -- not an acceptable solution.

Modelmaker, that's strange about the not-playing.  But ack, I just tried it myself, and am having the same problems.  Maybe I've just overloaded my system .  I was able to easily play my stream via MC earlier.  I'll reboot and come back

[modelmaker]

For kicks I loaded winamp5, then tried the Shoutcast site found your station; Adamradio and got the shoutcast announcement and then silence. Of course you might not have been 'casting at the time - I'll try again later.

[Drowbe]

I feel your shoutcast pains...I have tried a zillion hacks and work-arounds to be able to serve music via media center.  I even installed Windows Server 2003 (which can be a media server)...but alas, it doesn't support VBR mp3's...oh, they play, but at the *speed* of the average of the vbr.  Most of the time the music was about 3 times as fast as it should have been.

If anyone ever figures out how to shoutcast via MC (not including the *line-in* trick), please share the details.

Happy New Year all...

[ThatAdamGuy]

Jay (and others), yeah, sorry, I'm not shoutcasting today... gotta defrag my hard drive and handle other system issues.  But I'm ramping up for some neat stuff later this weekend, and when my station is online again, I'll post back again here

[ThatAdamGuy]

I heard back from Spacial Audio here, and they said the reason why MC doesn't work with their Winamp Shoutcast broadcaster tool is because MC fails to "fully support the Winamp 2 communication API."

What's MC's take on this?

[skwatch]

This is an interesting thread.  Why haven't anybody from J River replied to this? I run an Internet Radio Station (http://www.digital-djs.com) using Media Jukebox.  I stream up to a Windows Media Server.  Using Windows Media Encoder.  I wrote a special visualization program that outputs the track information via javascript and sends it to my webserver and stores it a database.  That way people can get a list of the last 20 tracks, etc.  I would like to offer a shoucast stream as well.  Are there any plans for getting Media Jukebox to the point that it can stream to a Shoutcast server.  It would make my life easier if you could support this.

[GHammer]

You might want to take a look at:
http://www.spacialaudio.com/products/winamp/
http://www.spacialaudio.com/products/simplecast/

They say they can act as a plugin for many systems.
"Record from DSP data or directly from soundcard."
And they do many (any?) format.

[skwatch]

Thanks, but the problem there is getting the real-time track information embedded into the stream like the way WinAmp does it.  I looked around the Spacial Audio Forum, and they act like that information is top secret.  You would think the people who create these streaming formats would have created a simple API the encoders could use to pull that real-time information.   I am starting to feel SETI will find extra terristrial life before I/we can be able to push out real-time info to our users/listeners without the use of WinAmp!

Does anybody on this board on how to get Spacial Audio to send the track information in real-time?

[GHammer]

Here's an article on how a shoutcast server gets the title info. Perhaps a nice programmer could create a plugin.

http://forums.radiotoolbox.com/viewtopic.php?t=74

[skwatch]

OMG - Bless you!!!!!  This is perfect!!!  This would simple enough to add in with a visualization plugin with a little javascript that make the http call - I will write a code snippet later this week!!!  I have some other code to finish first!