Trying to make a radio station...

DrossZro

Beta member
Messages
5
Hey everyone, new here, names Ryan, heres whats happenin:

I have a website through dot5hosting.com and i would like to incorporate an audio stream into it so its basically a radio station. Now with my hosting i cannot do live audio streams, i have to upload the files and they stream from there. I have to do this with HTTP Streaming, Dot5 referenced me to this Real HTTP Streaming . Im kinda new to hosting stuff, but otherwise ok with computers. Basically i have no idea what to do and im having trouble understanding what they say to do there. In the guide they say to use .ra but if possible i would like to stream .mp3's (i know i should go ogg vorbis but mp3's are more accessible), my hosting does support mp3 mime types. heres my site if that matters ryanvollmer.com

thanks for your help and ask anything you want to know,
ryan
 
Well, one option would be to just use a .m3u file. It is basically a plain text file that you list the names of the files (.mp3) that you want played. From there you could just update that file when you want different songs played. It wont be like a radio station in the sense that you would have control over what song the user is listening to at that moment, but its pretty close.

Google .m3u for more information on how to set that file up.
 
Thank you so much for that, it seems very simple and im pretty sure i can get that working. I do have two questions though.

Will the music "always" be playing in the sense that if two people clicked on it they would hear the same thing no matter when they click on it? Or would it be possible to at least make the files play random?

With that they cant download the actual files to there computer right? I have it disabled on my site so you cant see the root directory but im not sure if theres another way.

thanks again

ryan
 
Well, its basically a play list, so if one person clicks on it, then 2 minutes later, someone else clicks on it, I believe they would hear the same songs, but the second person would be 2 minutes behind.

As for downloading the files to their computer, if the user really wanted to, I am sure they could. The mp3 file is getting to their computer somehow, so I am sure they could keep it there if they want. The plus side is that if they just try to "save as" the .m3u file from your site, they will only get the playlist.

Dont quote me on any of this though, as I haven't really messed around with m3u files much. This is all "to the best of my knowledge"! :)
 
Ok i got it up and running, thanks for your help. Its at :
http://www.ryanvollmer.com/Music/player.html

Now, do you know of anyway to get it to play random? Media player has no code you can set for it to do this, so i was thinking of some kind of script i could enter into the playlist file to make it select the links which point to the actual files at random.
 
I get a 404 not found when I go to that link.

As for making a random order, I suppose you could use PHP to open up your m3u file, reorder all the songs in a random order, then save the file. That way each user would hear a completely random playlist with your specified songs each time.
 
yea for some reason it matters if the directories are capitalized, never noticed that before...

ryanvollmer.com/music/player.html

that should work

im gonna go diggin around for stuff on how to write up that PHP file though, thanks for the tip
 
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