Joined: 18 Dec 2003
Posts: 13497
Location: Behind You
Posted: 02/25/08 18:11
truthful:
Just read through this thread and its exciting stuff.
A few questions that I hope you can answer for me.
IF one was to say do three shows a week each lasting 3 hours , all in all 9 hours which package would be the one to go for.
What im basically after is some examples of what each package is able to do on a monthly basis.
The next question is regarding operations via a mac , will winamp work?
Thats it for now , and keep up the cool work.
Well, the packages we offer are pretty straight forward. The only limitation is bandwidth. So, you can do whatever you want- I won't be able to tell you how much bandwidth you will use as it will totally depend on how many listeners for how long and at what bitrate- and honestly this fluctuates so much that even an educated guess will be so far off the mark its not even worth trying
But, the way we have it set up, is that there is 1 jamroom integrated shoutcast package. You just start out with that, and as your station grows, you can addon more bandwidth at any time So you can effectively do your shows and anything else you want without any problems...we'll shoot you an email when you hit 80% of your bandwidth usage and at that point you can addon more bandwidth. Most people stream the entire month without using all of the default bandwidth allocation. Note too, we do not meter incoming bandwidth, so if you're streaming live...no problem on the bandwidth side. Bandwidth is only metered outgoing (to listeners).
Winamp (AFAIK) doesn't work on Mac... But there are some decent quality utilities you can use... Here is one that I know someone is using with good success (and if I had a mac this is probably what I would use):
I took a look at nicecast a while back and although it seems easy to use , while listening to some stations , and especially those broadcasting at a decent bit rate there was a lot of buffering going on which is a little annoying.
Joined: 18 Dec 2003
Posts: 13497
Location: Behind You
Posted: 02/25/08 18:29
The buffering will be one of a couple things (nothing to do with the software though).
1. The server itself needs to have good reliable bandwidth (thats where we come in )
2. You must be connected to a decent internet connection, and broadcasting at a bitrate that you can stream without issue through your internet connection (for example, if your upstream speed through your ISP is 128k, you will never be able to stream a 320k stream live...you don't have a fast enough connection. 96k would be the highest bitrate recommended for streaming live, but something smaller like 64k would be more reliable).
nicecast offers a built in shoutcast server...so a lot of times people will try to use that...but they don't realize that they just don't have the bandwidth speed through there ISP to support more then maybe 1 or 2 listeners Hence the reason for outsourcing to a host with a high speed connection (for example, we have 1000MB/ps connections which blows the socks off of most peoples 500k upload speed). Sometimes people mistake there internet connection speed as well, for example, our local ISP advertises a 6MB/ps connection...well, thats download speed, but uploading is limited to 700k...which would honestly support 1 listener at 320kbps stream bitrate.
ok starting to get the hang of this. DJ can you possibly add a "randomizer" for the playlist down the line?
I wanted to also ask those of you who have multiple DJ's in different locations how your setup is working? I have just started looking at this and have downloaded the DSP Plugin. What is the best setup you have found for multiple dj's?
ok guys someone help me out here. I was testing this out over the weekend with winamp and got everything working ok. However I do think there has to be a better way of doing this. That last sentence usually means user error .
ok so I loaded the dsp plugin and configured. My question stems from the Input section. Someone correct me on this process.
DJ changes the input to soundcard and pushes talk accordingly. Now when they want to play a song, that input has to be changed to Winamp in order for the music to stream? This was the only way I could get music to stream from winamp. Seems to me like there is something configured wrong or is this the correct process??
DJ - did anything else change? suddenly I get "Current song not available" in the control panel. The server is up and running though but the snippets do not display the song info either.
Joined: 18 Dec 2003
Posts: 13497
Location: Behind You
Posted: 03/18/08 12:49
Hey guys!
As some of you know, I have this horrible tendency of changing permissions when debugging code in the shoutcast control panel- and for a couple users its bumped the station offline My bad!
Thanks to Brians help figuring out looping arrays in .sh scripts, there is now a tidy little cron job running that will automatically fix anything I goof up when working on your station! hooray!
You should never again see "Invalid Media Directory"
That error is completely my fault (maybe I should let another admin help me with it so I can blame them ), but will never happen again
So you can effectively do your shows and anything else you want without any problems...we'll shoot you an email when you hit 80% of your bandwidth usage and at that point you can addon more bandwidth. Most people stream the entire month without using all of the default bandwidth allocation. Note too, we do not meter incoming bandwidth, so if you're streaming live...no problem on the bandwidth side. Bandwidth is only metered outgoing (to listeners).
