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How to Be an MP3 Server

One of the goals we had in establishing our MP3 service of House and Senate audio was to provide an resource that Missouri broadcast stations could use to enhance their own WWW services.

With the Missouri Broadcasters Association, we're working to help you get your station on Internet (without the high cost of a RealAudio server) and to provide some additional audio services you could include to enhance that service.

Yes, feel free to rebroadcast (on Internet or on air) our House and Senate audio streams or to use them just for radio coverage. If you are going to rebroadcast, we would ask that you give us credit and send us an email note. One reason is so we can warn you if we change the IP address of our server.

There are three steps to getting started:

• You first need an MP3 server. Shoutcast is the server we are using. It's built for Windows.
• We once had used software called Icecast. It's designed for Lynx, but there are versions for Windows. Believe it or not, we even found an OS/2 version here, at Hobbes. It's an earlier version that doesn't have all the features of current versions, but it does work.
• Real's server also supports MP3 files now.

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  Getting Live Sound to Your Server

  If you are going to provide just static files, the server itself will take care of that. But if it's live sound you want to distribute, you need WinAmp. That's right, the same program that plays MP3 files also can be used to encode and stream to a server.

  WinAmp functions as what is called an encoder. It takes sound from the server's sound card, converts it to an MP3 format and then streams that sound to Shoutcast. As a result, the Shoutcast server actually has two ports (one for outsiders to listen to Shoutcast) and the other for WinAmp to send data (the MP3 stream to be shared) to Shoutcast.

  But WinAmp cannot do it alone, there are a few other items you may need, depending on the version of WinAmp you're using. We're using a pretty old version, so some of the necessary files may already have been included in later WinAmp versions.

  Shoutcast and Winamp come from the same folks -- and their site is very good at explaining what you need and how to set things up.