How to start your own internet radio station
I get all the babes since I started my own radio station !
Legal Matters Sources of Free Music and Audio
3 Options for starting your own radio station Audio encoding
Promoting your Internet Station and Making Money
List your Internet Radio Station with us
Why Start an Internet Radio Station ?
Now you can be the DJ ! You can easily start your own Internet radio station to play and comment on your favorite songs, promote your band, start a talk show, promote your business , teach a class and for many other uses. There are many free streaming media software you can use and you can record you show and make archives with the great free audio editing software audacity
Keep in mind to speak clearly for your listening audience an use your ' he-man' voice !
An Internet radio station is an audio broadcasting service transmitted through the Internet. Because Internet broadcasting does not broadcast through radio waves or use limited frequencies that require licensing, it does not fall under FCC rulings. So you don't need a license in America as a broadcast station would . If you are broadcasting copyrighted material, you may need to pay a royalty .Websites with info on licensing in America: LoudCity and Swcast are the best options for a small operation .For larger operations there are BMI , ascap , SoundExchange and SESAC. In the U.K ppluk and MCPS .
Sources of Free Music and Audio
skreemr.com Search the web for DRM-free music, podcasts, speeches and much more
ecbrown vast mp3 linksource to free music
monkeyfilter huge list of music you can use
oddiooverplay.com free and legal online music
archive.org out of copyright material
soundclick.com free music
Internet radio involves a streaming medium that presents listeners with a continuous "stream" of audio over which they have no control, much like traditional broadcast media; in this respect, it is distinct from "on-demand" file serving. Internet radio is also distinct from podcasting, which involves downloading rather than streaming. Some of the first Internet-only commercial radio stations emerged in 1995.NetRadio "was one of the Internet's original Webcasters," eventually "streaming more than 100 channels including both music and spoken material.At its height, NetRadio offered more than 125 online radio stations and attracted more than 50 million listens per month, but closed shop after the dot com bust because of funding problems .
3 Options for starting your own radio station
There are three main ways to set up an internet radio station.
One is to install a server on your computer. There are many free sources for this such as icecast, freecast, firefly, Broadwave , and Shoutcast . Some servers that you can purchase are Pirateradio , Clipstream and Flash Media Server .
A second option is to use peer to peer technology with Peercast .The benefits of using PeerCast is that it allows any multicasters, particularly small or independent ones, to distribute their streams without need for much bandwidth, saving them costs.
A third option is to use a streaming hosting service such as Live365 , Spacialnet , wavestreaming ,Streamguys , Loudcity , Swcast , Fast-Serv and ubroadcast.com .
Most computers made in the last 3~4 years should be able to handle the server software. You should also have a fast DSL or cable connection. If you still have dial-up you can use PeerCast or some of the hosted options .
Create your own Live Talkshow with Skype and radiofreefinland.net
Free Streaming Media Software
Web Radio is a really good book - excellent if you've ever thought about setting up your own web radio station. What's a really good idea is the accompanying web site which will provide the latest info on trends, tools etc
Icecast is a free streaming media project maintained by the Xiph.org Foundation. Icecast is an audio broadcast system that manages both music and voice streaming. Typically, icecast and its streaming utilities use both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats. Listeners can connect to icecast servers using a variety of client applications.Chances are good that if you have ever listened to radio stations over the Internet they were using icecast or some related open source technology for their streaming needs.The LiveIce utility was developed for icecast to provide real-time streaming over the Internet.
Some stations using icecast .
FreeCast is a free software application which allows peer-to-peer streaming, sometimes called peercasting. It makes possible an audio (Ogg Vorbis) or video (Ogg Theora) stream broadcast to a large number of listeners from a simple DSL connection.The distributions can be download from http://download.freecast.org.
FireFlyFirefly Media Server (formerly mt-daapd) is an open-source media server (or daemon) for the Roku SoundBridge and iTunes. It serves media files using Roku Server Protocol (RSP) and Digital Audio Access Protocol (DAAP)
PeerCast is an open source streaming media multicast tool. PeerCast uses peer to peer technology to minimize the necessary upload bandwidth for the original multicastor.Peercast can be used to multicast streaming audio (Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WMA) and/or video (Ogg Theora, Nullsoft Streaming Video, or WMV), or any other stream of data, over the internet. Peercast uses a distributed bandwidth technique to lighten the load of the broadcaster's upstream bandwidth where each listener/viewer will relay the stream they download to one or more additional listeners.
Broadwave serves live or pre-recorded audio over the internet (audio webcast) via the http protocol in mp3. Broadwave allows users to stream audio on a website without the lag time whether you have pre-recorded or live audio.A free version has full features but requires you to host a link . If you do not want to have a link you can buy BroadWave Professional
SHOUTcast is a multiplatform freeware digital audio streaming technology developed by Nullsoft. It allows audio content, primarily in MP3 or HE-AAC format, to be broadcast to and from media player software, enabling hobbyists and professionals to create Internet radio networks.Some stations using shoutcast .
Live365 is an Internet radio network where members can create their own online radio station or listen to other Live365 broadcasters' online stations. As of October 2006, there are about 6,500 active stations. Users can create their own radio stations by purchasing a "Broadcaster" membership. Broadcast service membership packages vary in features and capability, allowing potential customers to select a package to better suit their needs.This is an option if you don't want to install your own server
Promoting your Internet Radio Station
There are thousands of internet radio stations out there, how do people find you ? If you are a new station, many internet radio guide probably won't list you . It is best to make a website or blog around your station so the search engines will find it. This may be the only viable way to make money with your internet radio stations, with ads or adsense. There have been some attempts to place ads on podcasts, but the business model doesn't seem workable yet. If you have a large audience, you could try to sell advertising on your website .ubroadcast.com let's you broadcast and place ads on your broadcast.
reciva.com You can suggest your website
mp3 and Ogg Vorbis
There are two major audio formats used for internet radio broadcasts, mp3 and Ogg Vorbis. Mp3 is the de facto standard encoding for the transfer and playback of music on mp3 players .MP3's use of a lossy compression algorithm is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners, but is not considered high fidelity audio by audiophiles. An MP3 file that is created using the mid-range bit rate setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is typically about 1/10th the size of the CD file created from the original audio source.Bit rates can vary from 32, 40, 48, 56, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 144, 160, 192, 224, 256 and 320 kbit/s, and the available sampling frequencies are 32, 44.1 and 48 kHz. A sample rate of 44.1 kHz is almost always used, because this is also used for CD audio, the main source used for creating MP3 files. A greater variety of bit rates are used on the Internet. 128 kbit/s is the most common, because it typically offers adequate audio quality in a relatively small space. 192 kbit/s is often used by those who notice artifacts at lower bit rates. As the Internet bandwidth availability and hard drive sizes have increased, 128 kbit/s bit rate files are slowly being replaced with higher bit rates like 192 kbit/s, with some being encoded up to MP3's maximum of 320 kbit/s.ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, or other information about the file to be stored in the file itself.Tag editing functionality is often built-in to MP3 players and editors, but there also exist tag editors dedicated to the purpose (see filerename.co.uk for a free open source example).
Vorbis is a free and open source, lossy audio codec project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and intended to serve as a replacement for MP3.The Vorbis format has proven popular among supporters of Free software.They argue that its higher fidelity and completely free nature, unencumbered by patents, make it a well-suited replacement for patented and restricted formats like MP3.Software supporting Vorbis exists for many platforms. Although Apple iTunes does not natively support Vorbis, the Xiph.Org Foundation provides a QuickTime component which can be used in iTunes and QuickTime on both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. On Windows, DirectShow filters existto decode Vorbis in multimedia players like Windows Media Player and others which support DirectShow. Vorbis is well-supported on the Linux platform in programs like XMMS, xine, and many more. More information about Vorbis-supporting software can be found at the Xiph.Org Foundation wiki. Users can test these programs using the list of Vorbis audio streams available on the same wiki.The ever-popular Winamp can also play ".ogg" vorbis files.
Other audio formats are Windows Media Audio, RealAudio and HE-AAC
Encoding tools to transform raw or encoded audio into a compressed format such as MP3 or Ogg Vorbis
One of the more popular encoders for transferring audio to MP3 format is LAME.LAME can be found at http://lame.sourceforge.net/.