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Recommended Hardware for Streaming MP3 Radio Stations? 171

Posted by Cliff from the how-beefy-should-it-be? dept.
Silent Node asks: "I am involved with a campus radio station where the web-site, e-mail, and pretty much everything else are hosted by third parties. In the interests of both cost savings, and control, we're considering purchasing our own server, and handling things directly. Aside from hosting a nothing-too-wild web site, this server would also have to hadle about two-dozen Email accounts, a couple mailing lists, and...streaming audio. I have experience administrating Windows NT, which is why I don't want to use it for this many things on one box. Our consideration is to perhaps get a G4 and run Linux on it. I have a few questions related to this... Would it be 'easier' just to run x86 Linux? What sort of minimum specs would a server like this need (remember, being listener funded, price is a big deal)? What streaming media sofware choices would we have (MP3 streams would be prefferable, due to the wide distribution of players)? Do you forsee any 'hang-ups' I haven't mentioned (i.e.: is this even practical)?"
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Recommended Hardware for Streaming MP3 Radio Stations? More

Recommended Hardware for Streaming MP3 Radio Stations?

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  • Bandwidth (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you are on a college LAN that runs DHCP that automatically assigns DNS names as well (like I am), you might want to clear a streaming mp3 server with your network administrators. The biggest mistake I've seen people make is putting up a server that stifles other network activity. Usually, the server gets its wire pulled and the owner of the server ends up with a dead connection and aren't allowed back on the network because of the congestion they caused. If your administrators know you're going to be doing this, they can throttle your bandwidth so that you can run the server and don't have to worry about losing your connectivity or getting taken down yourself.
  • MacOS is weak. It's based on technology that hasn't changed in 15 years Need I remind you that this is the same argument that Microsoft used in their Linux FUD page? Linux is based on 30 year old technology.

  • Dual Processor Warning (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I recently purchased a pair of Celerons and that Abit BP6 board. Very happpy with both!! However, my sound card isn't supported under a SMP (multi-processor) Kernel. This might be an issue if you guys are testing sound and whatnot. Just be sure that the hardware you purchase is compatible under SMP. Otherwise, I highly recommend this direction! My 2 chips were cheaper than one PIII 450 and I'm flying!! I go do so much at once, and it never slows down... sounds perfect for what you want to do!

  • Multicasting? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is a tangent, but what's happened with multicasting? I'd think that it'd be the perfect thing for sites broadcasting (i.e. not on-demand) streams to the Net. Instead of massive bandwidth for hundreds of streams, a site would need to send out only one stream. What's missing, the technology, the standards, a clue on the part of service providers, or a critical mass of users?
  • I am not sure what some other folks have used, but I ran a shoutcast setup for public use when winamp first debuted. I had two machines, my win98 box which would stream the mp3s (This particular machine had 3 cdroms and 10gigs of storage so a nice selection of mp3s) and one pentium 166 linux server running slack 3.0.

    I managed to make the top 10 on the shoutcast charts a few times, all being served over one Mediaone Cable Modem. When the load got really bad I would have a friend put up a mirror.

  • At work we have been toying around with products that claim to do what you want, but what people here are forgetting is that you might want to do it live. Many of those servers require you to already have the mp3s and a playlist of some sort. Right now, the best solutions is a rack mountable one that is a couple hundred bucks and it rips all incoming sound to mp3. It can be used for live stuff, and it works. All these icecast type solutions people are talking about won't work when you want to go live. (AFAIK) Anyways, check out hardware.mp3.com and you can see some of the rack-mounted stuff I was talking about.

    -Davidu
  • yup...thats what I meant and that is what I would think he want's to do.

    -Davidu
  • You can use icecast [icecast.org] for a free shoutcast compatible mp3 server.
  • Even on campus, I assume you want to reach all the students, even when they're home for the weekends or holidays. So don't forget the poor analog people (like me!)
  • Well, there is something called speakfreely which exists both for unix and windos. If it is compatible with anything else I don't know.
    Here is the unix version [fourmilab.ch] and windos version [fourmilab.ch].
  • Here's a complete, full solution. Computer: Since you're in education you canpick up a G4 cheap, so you'll be getting a good deal if you go with the G4. Plus, since the G4 is arguably overkill for your current applications, you'll have lots of room to manuver when it comes to addig additional services. If you want to spend even less ans still have the same quality you can go with any G3 based Mac since Linux is not yet optimized for Altivec.. Hell, the iMac, with it's 400Mhz G3, has oodles of pressing power for this type of thing.. The problem with the iMac is it's a bit difficult to add on another HD or other such things. Come to think of it, that's the only real drawback... If you get some other server service to do the streaming for you (see below) then you can get by with a 3 year old computer, like a P133 or a PowerMac 8100/100 since streaming's the only part that requires a big computer. Encoding: As for streaming MP3... Don't do it yourslef, it's daft.. You'll need to allocate a huge blob of bandwith and processing and ram to the task. If you go with QT streaming, you can get all the software for free, run the encoder on any computer you want and have a company like www.themusicweb.com do the actual broadcasting for cheap. It's cheap too. All you really need is a computer capable of running sorenson broadcaster and you're set. Plus, this setup has the advantage that your mail, web etc.. can go down wihtout your streaming going down and vice versa. QT Streaming: In Qt streaming you have a computer do the encoding (compressing) this computer then sends it's compressed stream over any connection (even a 14.4 modem) to the streaming server which does all the streaming (it has to be this way :-( ). THis mean that if you have a half decent laptop with a wireless modem you can broadcast from anywhere on earth and have total control over your stream. Cool. Then there's are the traditional reasones for QT stream: good quality, massive choice of CODECs (!), open source server (which I think has a Linux client), free...... Finally... Of course, if you get the badwidth for free, then go the the G4 and run Linux and maybe that MP3 encoding thing. The G4 will run everything today with processing room left over and when they do a build of Linux and the encoding tools, optimized for Altivec, it'll really fly. Plus, it's fun to have a fast computer. Other readers: Feel free to correct me if I mentioned something slightly off. I'm running off memory here.
  • sounds like you're running an sblive. I've got the same setup running (2x 333mhz celerons @550mhz + sblive) and while the sound quality sucks, creative's drivers will work with an SMP kernel. Check out this site [euronet.nl] for more info.
  • Sorry, but remember they want to run Mail and a website on this box. We're forced into NT at work, and one thing ANY sysadmin knows not to do is place IIS and Exchange server on the same box. That's instant suicide. Both of those servers are hogs and you expect it to encode mp3 too? Please forgive me if I think your nuts.
  • :)

    www.linuxppc.{org|com}
  • Well... soon as what ever encoder takes advantage of it... then you'll be able to encode MP3s/sorrenson/QDesign AUdio at an amazing speed...

    Remember, the AltiVec is basically one massive DSP :)

    And this is what DSPs excel at!
  • It's a 4-port ethernet 10/100 card (only currently supported under OSXS) PLUS the built in 10/100bT port on the motherboard :)

    For a total of 500mbps of switched bandwidth, yummy.

    Of course, you could put another 2 of those cards in! Or put gigabit ethernet cards in! (Its a build to order option!)

    MOSXS is one very very stable OS.

    Only reason I run LinuxPPC, is it won't run on my hardware ;) no offence.
  • Actually, the iMac that sits on my desktop at work has a hardtime playing an mp3 period, let alone serve them. We have yet to be able to get shoucast to work properly on that box as well (that is without crashing the MacAMP app).

  • G4? (Score:3)

    by Millennium ( 2451 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @04:23AM (#1627593)
    The major problem with the G4 is that LinuxPPC won't run on it yet. Soon, but not just yet.

    Even when it does, I doubt AltiVec support is going to be in GCC for at least another year, and probably more like two, although now that Apple uses GCC to compile OSX it's quite possible that they'll contribute Velocity support themselves rather than wait for it to come "naturally." And they will contribute it if they write it; Steve Jobs is still reeling from his last skirmish with the FSF and I don't think he's willing to try closing modifications to GCC again.

    This said, Icecast seems to be the way to go for a streaming server. QuickTime is your other major option, and while it works quite well there's the problem of the fact that there is no Linux QuickTime Streaming player, so you'll cut off a portion of your audience.

    What I find off here is that no one has mentioned bandwidth, which is just as important as processor power. You probably already have significant bandwidth because of the Webserver, but you might want a separate connection for the new one (getting a 10Base-T on campus shouldn't be hard at all; of you're lucky you might be able to get 100Base-T). The college itself should have adequate bandwidth for your needs.

  • Re:running mp3 stream radio station. (Score:3)

    by mvw ( 2916 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @01:17AM (#1627594) Journal
    recently on freshmeat i have read that someone has improved the lame encoder so that it takes advantages of MMX/3DNow extentions found in newer CPUs: the name is GOGO but i have not tried it yet.

    The gogo encoder is in the FreeBSD ports collection [freebsd.org]. A fine Japanese contribution by the way. This is from the Description [freebsd.org]

    gogo, 'Gogo no coder' (which means 'afternoon coder'), is a very fast MP3 encoder based on lame-3.23 which is optimized for MMX, K6-2 3DNow! and Intel PentiumIII SSE. The latter is available when FreeBSD supports SSE. (Linux supports it.)

    *** DON'T OVERCLOCK YOUR K6-2 ***
    Gogo heavily uses the 3DNow! unit that almost is asleep usual, and the CPU becomes very hot even in normal clock. So overclock may cause serious internal errors or crazy results. Also, this may be same on PentiumIII.

    You can download it from here [freebsd.org]. Other related interesting stuff like icecast [freebsd.org], vic [freebsd.org] and vat [freebsd.org] has been ported to FreeBSD [freebsd.org].
    Feel free to try.

  • RAM shouldn't be an issue with icecasting.. I was running about 120 icecast channels off a P5/166 linux server with 64MB RAM. Hardly broke 0.2 load, and never EVER swapped. The same server ran a toy web/FTP server as well as most of my telnet sessions, over a 10mbps frac-T3 hooked to my Tulip 10/100 card.

    Encoding never seemed to take up much memory on my UltraSPARC IIi using the old Frauenhofer encoder, but it did absorb all CPU..

    Until memory gets down below the 'Taiwan disaster' gouge, I'd hold off on getting that much, particularly if it's in 256M DIMMs...
  • If you use icecast then any reasonable CPU these days will saturate a 100MB ethernet with plenty of CPU to spare. So using a big CPU doesn't get you that much extra.

    For example using LiveIce and Icecast on the same machine I can encode live audio and saturate my 100Mbit card on a PIII.

  • Of Course It's Suitable for Live Streaming.... I mean I'm the author of LiveIce and I['m pretty damn sure that I can stream live.

    (and even before shoutcast came along you could use mp3serv to broadcast live from linux...)
  • Just a Quick correction - patching Icecast may sound scarey.... if it does then prepare to be disappointed. You need to patch the Linux Kernel or at least build a special kernel module to sneak past certain limitations in teh Xing Encdoer which stops it reading from pipes.

    Would It qualify as a conspiracy theory if I pointed out that the Beta version of xingmp3enc (released before Real bought them) worked fine without any need to hoodwink it into working?
  • Timeout there. This is supposed to be an 'on the cheap' project - that basically means whatever the poor guy can scrap together. I'd say anything more than $1000 for the hardware is asking too much. Sorry, but clustering is clearly not an option for this - and is /vastly/ overkill. A DX4/100 can stream about 7.8mb/s... anything with a PCI architecture can push 60+. All he needs is a cpu powerful enough to decode the mp3 in realtime (P60's can decode, but they can't do anything else - atleast a 233 can let him serve content and stream simul) and lots and lots of RAM.

    That's just my $0.02 though.

    --

  • ... (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @07:27AM (#1627600)
    To answer your question - yes and no. It's practical. It just depends on how much traffic you get. The key thing here is /not/ cpu - but memory. Assuming you want to run linux on this bad boy, here's what you'll need:
    • icecast [icecast.org] - streaming 'shoutcast' clone for linux.
    • Large mp3 collection. (BYOA - bring your own archive. *g*)
    • If you think you won't have more than 50 simultanious listeners on this box, a K6-350 or a P266 ought to be sufficient. Due to the nature of icecast, it only needs to encode the stream *once* and stream it out - so it's largely a bandwidth issue. If you're going to have more than 50, and will be serving dyn-html off the same site (generating playlists and whatnot), you might want something abit more beefy. Either way, consider 256mb of RAM your minimum.
    • As for HDD, here again - it just 'depends'. A good strategy might be two drives - one for your mp3 archive / wav files, the other for your web pages & stuff. Regular old IDE drives will do well under this setup and you don't have to worry much about blips in the audio if you have the streams on a seperate (dedicated) drive
    • Apache web server with perl_mod and/or php3_mod. But this is more for quick development of webpages and access to databases than anything else.
    • I don't know if it'll be much use to you, but I couldn't resist plugging my mp3db [freshmeat.net] program to help organize your collection. :)
    • I would seriously recommend ripping / encoding on a seperate box to keep the load down. I'm sure there won't be a problem finding volunteers to send you pre-encoded mp3s on campus. :^) If you want a free software encoder, check out LAME (no url, sorry!) - it works very well as long as you give it somewhat high bitrates. Otherwise freshmeat [freshmeat.net] has a variety of mp3 utilities in the app index under console/mp3

    • Hope this helps!

      --

  • Check out http://WVTC.net/ [wvtc.net] - the radio station of Vermont Technical College. They have been using some custom Linux software to run a radio station completly from MP3's. I forget all the details, but you can e-mail the guys who set the whole system up to get the dirt. Encoding for low bandwidth users is easy to do in software, and if you are just spitting out pre-encoded stuff, you are basically limited to the bandwidth of your upstream pipe.
  • > You CAN build an IDE RAID system which is much cheaper per megabyte than SCSI but getting an
    > IDE RAID controller that works nice under linux/FreeBSD will take some searching.

    The Duplidisk from ARCO http://www.arcoide.com [arcoide.com] works fine in Linux. Given the cost constraints of this project, I'd suggest using one or even going with software RAID instead. SCSI RAID is likely to add a lot to the total project cost, without providing much real benefit, IMO. Use any 'spare' money for more RAM, or even towards a second server!

    Jonathan

  • If I read davidu's post correctly, by live he doesn't mean outgoing live, but rather incoming live music (like, say, a concert that he wants to broadcast over the internet). For that sort of live, one would have to buy hardware (AFAIK).

  • K7 (Score:1)

    by dadams ( 9665 )
    A K7 would make a great streaming server, plus it would have plenty of power left over to run other stuff. A G4 isn't such a great idea, as the ideal solution would probably involve MacOSX and Quicktime streaming server, which isn't cheap. K7s are cheap and fast; the perfect budget server.
  • I stream 128bit/44khz off of a P2-266. It's very capable of handling that sort of transformation. I can stream live off of my Line-recording, so I can play cd's without ripping them or do some live DJing (I suck, but people listen anyways). The shoutcast server can be run from a machine that has a faster connection than the machine that you DJ from.

    You use a Shoutcast Source plug-in to send the source to the server. The server can be a Linux, or some other high-capacity server.

    I use Live365 for my server, because they'll give ANYONE a 100 listener channel, all you have to do is apply for it. The only thing they can't do is relay the song name/artist info that you would normally send out to the listeners. Samll price to pay for that kind of bandwidth.

    All I have to do is find the bandwidth to send out a single 128-bit/44khz stream, NP over DSL.




  • This machine was built for the big block manipulations required for MP3 encoding, it's going to be hella fast at ripping.

    Too bad you can't buy it with a decent OS.

  • A little testy, AC? MacOS is weak. It's based on technology that hasn't changed in 15 years, and was never meant to be a powerhouse OS in the first place.

    OS X might rock, if Apple could release it. 'Til then, I re-iterate: It would be nice to buy a G4 with a decent OS.



  • Live365 will give you 100 128bit/44khz channels (I don't think you' want that, unless everyone on campus has a network connection, you can pare it down to whatever you feel is right) more if teh case arises. All you have to do is apply for it and supply a single, full bandwidth stream (ie 128b/44khz) to their servers via shoutcast.
  • Maybe I'm missing something here: MP3 IS MPEG 1 Layer 3 audio.

    In my experience, it takes just as long to rip a cd at 56bits/22Khz as it does to rip one at 128bits/44khz. And a P2-266 with 128megs of RAM can encode a live stream at 128bits/44khz, just fine.

    Fine tuning for speed isn't really that big of a deal. Finding a fast machine with a fast connection to the internet to act as your MP3 server is.

    And I'm not sure there is a server that can serve out the same source stream as both high and low speed streams, so you may need two servers.

    Perhaps vmware for one of the servers?
  • Well, with one of your free installs, try installing OS X server onto a new G4 machine.

    Think Not.

    I re-re-iterate: It would be nice to be able to buy a G4 with a decent OS.
  • Yeah! Great! Awesome! Specs look Killer! Where can you get one of these?!?

    Oops, I guess this whole line of thought is completely moot to the task at hand.
  • I wnat you to cite sources for the availability, not the theoretical performance specs, dumbass.
  • Uhm..the QT Streaming server isn't cheap? Last I checked, it was an Open Source project, FREE to download, already ported to linux. You want cheaper than free??
  • I built a streaming MP3 station called Fat Free Radio (http://www.fatfreeradio.com) and it runs on a dual P3-500, 512MB RAM, Ultra2SCSI drives. It's nice (it also runs mySQL) and it works great!

    if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
  • The only thing they can't do is relay the song name/artist info that you would normally send out to the listeners.

    I've noticed this.. (I listen to some of the live365 streams sometimes) .. is it because they are using old software or some technical reason or what?

  • Isn't a layer 4 switch a lot of $$$? Can you point me to some models? I'd like to look into that. I love networking gear. :)
  • You raise a very good point - however, linux is a superbly multitasking OS, right? I've run apache very successfully off of a p200, and I surmise that encoding would also run off a p200 quite well. Take into account the 100MHz FSB, and how sdram is easier and cheaper to find than edo simms, plus 1/2 the basic hardware (ie nic, case, powersupply, vidcard) and I still think a single machine is the way to go.
  • I would say that a G4 would probably be overkill. Although LinuxPPC is seemingly fast and very secure, I don't think that you need that much power to do what you want. If you want a bunch of power, you can always pick up a couple of Celeron's and an Abit BP6 - but I have a feeling that a p2-400 would probably do your job. The thing to worry about would most likely be bandwidth. I don't know how bandwidth-intense streaming audio is, but if you run a website off of it too, you have to consider good bandwidth. If you're on the campus ethernet network, I'd say you're good to go. Also, this isn't the BEST time in the market to say this, but in my experience, everything runs better when it's loaded up with plenty of RAM.
  • While an Athlon is faster than an equivalatly clocked PIII, i haven't seen any SMP Athlon MB's. What good would buying an Athlon 500 today do when you mix in the premise next year he can get a SMP Athlon board? That's irrelevant.

    One day I'll be able to buy a dual 2.2 GHz system for under $2000, but I wouldn't tell someone to postpone their purchase because of that.

    Right now, the way I see it, is Athlon's a great gaming machine and office PC, but for workstations and servers, I'd not go out of my way to accomodate it. A dual P-III system will, yes, cost much more than an Athlon, but you'll notice much more drastic performance benefits, IMO.
  • I hate to sound like a Mac Zealot, but stop with the FUD. Just about every chunk of the MacOS has been re-written, and it shows. Gone are the random memory errors of System 7. The multitasking still isn't preemptive, but most apps are well behaved these day. I get away at work with working in Quark and Photoshop, encoding music to MP3, listening to MacAmp, with Lotus notes open in the background and rarely crash. When I do, it's mainly Note's fault, but I can't remove it becuase that's how the company email works.

    The summary is, yeah, the mac was severly lacking 4+ years ago, but the current OS has come a huge way since then. It's unbelievable. You can still crash the thing, but it takes much more effort.
  • i was thinking of using gogo for my broadcasting project, but both gogo and lame don't allow bitrates below 32kbps. I wanted to have a 24kbps stream, but i'll have to use some other encoder in order to get that.

    anyone know where i can get more info on all of this patching the kernel business involved in using Xing? I was gonna bill the radio station for an extra $20 and buy Xing.

    Doviende

    "The value of a man resides in what he gives,
    and not in what he is capable of receiving."

  • Well actually, I have one sitting on my desk right now! It does smell a little bit though... does that count as Vapourware?

  • won't need a G4 server for what is basically a file server. There's several routes you can take depending mainly on your expected volume. Windows NT as you probably know is a crappy idea but good ideas would be FreeBSD or Linux. If money is an issue then you might want to go with a Celeron based server which is just a P2 core with an on-chip cache running at 66mhz. This is plenty of speed for a web server as long as you have plenty of RAM (probably over 512MB). Icecast is a good MP3 streaming server which is available in source for linux (glibc), Solaris, and Windows. Encode the MP3s at or below 64kbps to maximize bandwidth and keep the file size relatively low. DOn't forget the RAID5 setup for quick access and expandable space. You CAN build an IDE RAID system which is much cheaper per megabyte than SCSI but getting an IDE RAID controller that works nice under linux/FreeBSD will take some searching. If it's something you want to try you can download the source to QuickTime Streaming Server (don't say that in CUpertino, there it's called Darwin Streaming Server).
    So to make it short:
    Celeron or P2 processor (at least 400mhz)
    at least 512MB RAM
    RAID5 with lots of space
    64kbps (at 22khz) for good playability
    I don't suggest a Mac server because I can't testify to the reliability to PPC linux or MacOS X. Alot of the question depends on your bandwidth too. If you're running off a full T3 you're going to need a faster server with more RAM because more people are going to be using it at once. If you've got a smaller connection you don't need as much umph in the server and you probably should encode the MP3s at a lower bitrate to maximize your bandwidth.
  • Be would make a horrible server OS, so would NT which is too unstable for a high volume site without a bunch of machines behind a switch. Linux SMP works great if you're doing server applications (as long as icecast and apache are revamped to use SMP). The improvements that came after the Mindcraft shit really improved SMP performance.
  • Wow two whole days uptime, when you get 70 days uptime with Windows you can think you're cool.
  • The chip runs on a 200mhz bus, the rest of the system (including it's RAM) is only 100mhz. I don't have time to educate you with links to this common knowlege.
  • I guess you haven't been paying attention. Ram can set you back almost $3/meg these days.
  • inux is based on ideas that are 30 or so years old mac OS IS 15 years old. and it sucked then to. The Mac OS codebase has changed as much or more as Linux has since since 1991. Apple has sitched the OS from 68k to PowerPC native code, rewritten the VM system several times and overhawled the networking code. The only part that hasn't really changed are some of the older API's (which are being ditched in OS X), but the same thing can be said about Linux......
  • One thing you might consider is using SCSI disks instead of IDE. SCSI will cost more, but your processor can spend its time encoding mp3's or serving web pages instead of pushing the hard disk. You also might have two disks; one larger one to hold the web pages/email/mp3's and a smaller one for encoding tracks.

    On bitrate, are you going to be catering to dorm students only or also to those living off campus? If you want to do both, I suggest having two seperate streams, one at 48 bits and the other at 128, which makes a good compromise between quality/bandwith/disk space and give you a larger audience.

    As for what kind of cpu you need, a 400 mhz PII or 350 mhz G3 would probably do you just fine if you have a SCSI disk and a good amount of ram (I'd say 256, but you could probably get away with 128). Depends on how much of an audience you expect to have and how much web/email serving you plan to do.
  • Listen up folks... I run 4 128kbit streams
    off of my server using Icecast.
    Wanna know how much cpu/ram they use??

    Icecast uses 1.33% ram (64M) and less than 1% CPU of a P-100!
    Shout uses a steady .80% ram sending it's stream to icecast.


    Now if you have, say, 600 streams... you're going to need a whole lot of ram... but you're not going to need a p-II 400 or a G-4.

    If you're going to encode on the fly... that's different. I'd like to re-encode to 64kbit streams
    for some folks.. but that p-100 just can't handle it
    and I'm outta hd space :>

    Anyway... I run my own radio station for myself and
    a select number of friends... all my cd's are
    encoded and stored on my server... I just connect
    up anytime I want to listen to them...

    As for stability?
    Icecast has been running on my linux server for
    nearly 6 months straight now. Not a burp, twitch or
    even sideways look. *shrug* Works for me.

    I'd love to see a write up on how this all turns out.

  • AC's are soooo annoying... especially when they don't
    read your entire post before responding...

    They never mentioned needing to encode real-time yet
    I still mentioned that you would need a MUCH faster 'puter for doing just that...

    *knock-Knock* Hello? Dweeb?
    Jeeze.. am I pissy today or what?

    Musta been that bowl of Crabby Flakes(TM) I had for
    breakfast, eh?

  • This is somewhat off-topic, but I'd like to know what free software alternatives there are for doing Voice over IP, multi-part conferanancing etc etc on Linux. The only thing thats important is that they should be compatible with some Windows applications. Having just Linux clients just won't cut it.
  • The G4 servers are listed in the Apple store as unfortunately 'not yet available'. The hardware bundle looks really sweet, too. 18 GB Ultra2 SCSI (dual channel controller), 4 port 100 MB Ethernet, 256 MB RAM, 500 MHz G4 cpu. It would be a great box for this application.

    If I was doing this I would check out the availability targets first before saddling myself with some sort of frankenclone.
  • Macintouch [macintouch.com] reported people started receiving Apple Store orders of Sawtooth 450 MHz G4's around Sept 24.

    The older Yosemite based 400 MHz systems were showing up even earlier.
  • Did a little research on this - Apple has halted delivery of G3 server orders pending, and is in the process of building G4 servers with Mac OS X installed. Expected delivery is 1-2 weeks. I imagine when they catch up with the G3 orders they will open up the Apple Store for G4 server orders.

    I think that anyone that is comptemplating a G4 server should nose around a bit. These things are *not* far off.

  • Re:G4 is going to rip the Sh*t out of an MP3 (Score:3)

    by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @02:07AM (#1627637)
    Why is it that slashdotters seem to ignore the fact that Mac OS X server has been out for some time now, and it's quite possible to buy Macs off the shelf with it preinstalled? I think that the G4 servers [apple.com] running Mac OS X server would be very nice for this job. A great combination of a good operating system and top notch hardware.

    The prices shown on this page are not the edu prices, either.
  • arowpoint http://www.arowpoint.com

    and

    Foundry server Iron


    are 2 layer4 switches

  • Linux has a very good reputation when it comes to mp3 stream serving. The best utility for this is (a href="http://www.icecast.org">icecast. The web site includes pointers on what other software ull need (decoders such as bladeenc).

    The hardware is quite easy to, a P II 400 will cope easely as long as you give it enough ram. 256Mb would be a nice amount to start out with.. Mailing lists and websites wont realy impact on performance that much.
    The main problem you will encounter however is bandwidth usage. For a good quality stream you need 128kbit - dual isdn .. thats 14 K a second PER listener. So its very important to decide on a good speed (64Kbit is still decent quality) ... or offer several streaming speeds (modem / isdn / cable), and make sure you do you do the math, what type of line are you on, and how many do you want to serve. Suppose you want to be able to serve 100 clients, with a full quality stream.. thats 100 * 14 K/sec .. thats 140K/second .. this will easely eat up a full t1 .. suppose you want to grow and serve over 1000 clients ? ... well u get the picture :)



    -- Chris Chabot
    "I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"
  • I RUN the LIVE webcast of our LIVE broadcast signal at WRUW-FM in Cleveland, OH. WRUW is the campus station of Case Western Reserve Unieristy [cwru.edu]

    Live webcasting is what I do. Check it out at the WRUW page. [cwru.edu] MP3 is definately the way to go. We have a 300 (clocked to 450) celeron and 128mb ram. It's on a dual board, so if we ever need more power, it'll be real simple. we've got a SB Ensoniq PCI soundcard that we feed our signal off or our airboard. We run Linux (duh :-),lame [sulaco.org] with some magic with named pipes and netcat and apache and we have as many streams as we want.

    We also have an AudioActive [audioactive.com] hardware MP3 encoder, that the folks at Telos/Audioactive were kind enough to donate (They ROCK!). It encodes one signal (56kbps) and our server encodes another (24kbps).

    I discovered that to the sound quality of 56k is comparable to a normal FM broadcast, so you really don't need a higher bitrate. The 24k stream is mono for modem users.

    The biggest bottleneck is definately your bandwidth to the rest of the world. We are lucky enough at CWRU to have one of the worlds biggest ATM LANs. The 155MB/s of oncampus bandwidth is denfinately nice to have. We were on ethernet, and I was dreading possibility of crashing our Ethernet segment. Now with ATM, we can have unlimited on campus listeners (because more Case students have computers than radios :-) and our off campus bandwidth lets us have about 150 listeners from elsewhere. If you have more questions, please don't hesitate to email me. It should be pretty obvious as to what my email is :-)

  • 98... (Score:1)

    by delmoi ( 26744 )
    Well, 98 is a lot more unstable then linux, my 98 box usualy can make it about a day and a half without crashing... winamp, and my TV tuner card software seem to really like to kill it.

    98 isn't that stable, but one to two days of uptime isnt' that bad ether.
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • Linux is based on ideas that are 30 or so years old mac OS IS 15 years old. and it sucked then to. It uses the exact same model, wheas with linux/unix only the APIs and the UI have stayed constant (with new APIs comming out for advanced features)
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • I'd like to see a MacOS 8 box serve web pages, email and stream mp3s. Linux lets you get work done, lots of it. unfortunetly for Mac zelots, it requres some mental capacity...
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"

  • BE??? (Score:1)

    by delmoi ( 26744 )
    Does be have mp3 servers? or even good email/web servers (sendmail/apache)?

    BeOS is mainly a single user OS from what I've heard, It may be solied but I don't know if it makes a lot of sense as a server right now.

    NT would cost a lot of money for a server licens, over a thousand dolars. remember the workstation version limits you to only 10 simultanious Server links (is there a reg hack to get around this?)

    I don't think the SMP code in linux is that bad. It may not be as good as NTs, but it'll work
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • that would cost almost $2,000!!! remember, this guy wants to do it inexspensively, I don't care what you say about iMacs, but they are not cheap. from what I've read on these posts, icecast on linux would probably work, with maybe a second box for encoding the live stream. any low end intel would do, and you can get two x86s for less then $1,000. and pluss they want to use mp3s, not qt4.
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • uh, I didn't say I was cool beacuse my windows box was up for 2 days
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • obviously, dispite the rewrites, the coders never got a clue, lets they break the applications, since they depend on non-protected memory. I relize that MacOS X or whatever will have this, but it's still somthing like 6 years since windows 3.1....
    "Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
  • He said this is a campus radio station.

    The listeners which are on the campus LAN are restricted by LAN bandwidth, not WAN bandwidth. T1 is only a fraction of 10/100Mbps LAN.

  • Should the encoder machine also be a server? It might be better to have the encoding done by a dedicated machine, with the resulting stream fed through LAN to the server. This avoids conflicts between the encoding and server software. If the two machines are in the same room then a dedicated LAN for the audio stream can also avoid LAN congestion problems for this source feed.

    There may also be advantages in putting the server in a campus network center, having only the encoder machine in the radio facility. If the audio feeds will be allowed out through the firewall to the Internet, the campus network people have to be consulted. They also may want to set limits for WAN versus LAN use. (How many people on campus will use LAN audio if they can use a $10 radio? But maybe alumni or off-campus residents will like the stream...)

  • I am stuck in the same boat too.
  • It depends on how fast you want to stream. e.g. 24kbit/s or 128kbit/s (where 24k is better so that people with slow 33.6 modem connections still have a chance to hear you).

    In my (humble) experiences lower bitrate is good, except in music. I'm not sure what will be played on the campus radio, but I'm guessing it won't be speech (virtually the only thing which can be decently encoded at 24kbps). Slashdot radio? [thesync.com] Yeah, even they can get away with it, but have you noticed how lossey the sound quality is?

    Those of us who visit Shoutcast regularly over 33.6k modems know that after finding a low bitrate site, the quality is less than a 50s A.M. radio. *sigh*

    My recommendation is, if enough processor power is left, to encode at both 24 and 128 kbps. But, if as you mentioned, lame uses 20% of a K6-450's time just at 24kbps, it may be better to have a dedicated radio server on a powerhouse machine. As usual, the only thing holding you back is the dinero for the project.



    -----

  • ...it takes just as long to rip a cd at 56bits/22Khz as it does to rip one at 128bits/44khz.


    It's not about ripping speed, which is based largely on the speed of a CD/DVD-ROM drive, but about encoding speed. This is especially noticeable on slower machines.

    My Pentium 233MMX using bladeenc takes about, oh, fifteen minutes to encode a five minute song at 160kbps. It can be done in a fraction of that time at lower bitrates.

    Yeah, I'll agree, a PII-266 with gobs of RAM can do a good job of encoding. So can a 386. What we're looking for is a machine which can do it in real time. Broadcast radio isn't going to take ten every hour just to let the buffer on the server fill up.

    Fine tuning for speed isn't really that big of a deal.


    Er, um... riiiight.
    If we lived like that, Microsoft would be making billions. Oh, wait...



    -----
  • Depending on your campus's size and configuration, you may be able to use multicasting to seriously reduce load. I don't know specific configuration details, but since you didn't mention it, I'd assume you'd not looked into it.
  • I guess if you're campus radio bandwidth won't be much of an issue, but for the rest of us it would be the largest cost in this sort of setup.

    Apart from that you should be able to run all of this easily on something like a P450. More RAM would definitely help with the streaming.

    Apple's streaming software is one of the best open-source choices out there I believe, but it might work better with *BSD rather than Linux.

  • a 24k stream is not that bad at all... at least much better then realaudio (from my subjective point of view). and the network bandwith: one can mirror the mp3 streams at different location using icecast alias feature..

  • cpu power necessary:
    • it depends on how fast you want to stream. e.g. 24kbit/s or 128kbit/s (where 24k is better so that people with slow 33.6 modem connections still have a chance to hear you). a faster stream costs you more CPU power.
    • then the encoding software matters. some software is better optimized and needs less cpu power for the same quality then other. e.g. comercial xing encoder needs less cpu then the free "lame" encoder. recently on freshmeat i have read that someone has improved the lame encoder so that it takes advantages of MMX/3DNow extentions found in newer CPUs: the name is GOGO but i have not tried it yet.

    • encoders often have a switch where you can choose encoding quality where you can tweak cpu usage...

    i use a K6-450 to produce a 24kbit/sec stream with the free LAME encoder (based on the ISO sources..) and it uses about 20% of the CPU time. the stream is then sent to an icecast server and several other icecast server mirror that stream with "alias" defines.

    greetings mond.
  • MP3 is a good choice since it has good compression and is available. It (should) support variable bitrates. Consider the workload of true-speed compression in MPEG 1 Layer III since it is rather high (lotsa FFT & psychoaccoustic stuff). Off course: higher compression :: more work. Maybe there are DSP's available to do this for you.
    there is lotsa stuff & references in the 'IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE', september '97 issue. Maybe someone has something more recent? Mi2e-2
  • Icecast and shoutcast can very easily be used 'live' afaik. With shoutcast and winamp, the cpu time used is the same as for a normal playlisted mp3 (since winamp+shoutcast re-encodes all streams, even if they stay at the same bitrate as the original file). Icecast, however, will require more cpu time, since icecast doesn't re-encode a file if it's being broadcast at the same bitrate as the source file. Either way, both will handle a live stream fine.
  • With the G4 box (450 or higher Sawtooth version), you will be able to stream MP3 and run a Quicktime Streaming Server. At least the QTSS software implementation is absolutely free and supports at least 2000 connections (AFAIK). In addition, the system already has 10/100Base-T Ethernet already and plenty of bandwidth power out of the box. Enough to serve an entire university population? Maybe. Just make sure to load it with RAM (I believe its limit is 1.5 GB). The Mac has a nice feature of being able to turn itself on, run assigned tasks and turn itself off at scheduled times.

    -----
    Linux user: if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
  • If all you are going to do is to perform streaming of already encoded MP3s then you will only need an ok Processor, on about Celeron300. You should have quite a bit of RAM tough, depending on the number of listeners. What you REALLY should consider is the BANDWIDHT, as a 30 min. MP3 is approx. 17 MB, and each session will require 17MB/(30min*60sec)=9.7kb/sec If you then get about 100 listeners, this will require about 1 MB/sec, which is ok if you have a good network. Ofcourse you will get into PROBLEMS if you get more listeners. What you could do, depending on the network topology of your university is to place the server, or perhaps a replica of the server in the IT-Department, where most of the dial-up users call, and where the dorms most probaby is connected too. This would make it easier and FASTER.
  • I don't know how many listeners you have or if it's bad, when your (mp3) station goes offline, but if you don't want to accept downtimes, you should buy a separate server for mp3. The other one can handle the rest and be a lowlevel machine. If some students decide to hack you, it's much less likely that your whole station goes down.
  • Call me paranoid, but I wouldn't brag online that you haven't updated firewall or OS code in two years...

  • Well, I've seen some people posting that Icecast isn't suitable for live streaming. Well, that's not true, 'cause that's what I do with it ;-)

    I have (or rather had; I graduated in June) set up a Linux server at a tiny college station to serve up web pages, mailing lists and an MP3 stream of their broadcast. I'd direct you to it, but the power is not too reliable in the area, so it's often down for long spans of time because the new admin is too busy(?) to walk over and switch it back on. I couldn't convince the exec board to shell out for an APS, unfortunately...

    The server itself is not very beefy (and does not need to be, really). It's a Celeron 333a with 128 MB RAM running RedHat 6.0 (when it's running...). I have the station's broadcast jacked directly into the input of the soundcard (SB AWE64). I run Liveice at 32 kbps, 22khz 'cause it doesn't sound too 'underwater' at that rate. The CPU and memory loads are trivial. I had wmmon running on my desktop when I was working on the machine at school and barely noticed the CPU trace at the bottom of the CPU meter. The memory load looked to be about 10%, if that much. The site's never been very busy, so that could be a factor. For connectivity, I hang the server off of the campus network, which is fast ether to the Internet gateway, which I think is frame-relay (the admins were rather secretive about it).

    So, basically Linux + IceCast + Celeron 333a + 128 MB RAM is plenty for me. If you have a huge amont of traffic, you may need more, but I'm betting (as other people have noted) that you'll saturate yr pipe before yr server starts to sweat.

    HTH,

    -Chris
  • NT can be very stable, as long as you don't push it too hard..
    It runs great for our low volume print server at work.
    However, in my experience, it dies pretty fast under high load...
    Our midrange load stuff goes on Linux boxes, and high stuff goes on our Sun E 6000's or one of our few 10000's..
  • Yes, and icecast can do this..
    Icecast just shoots out an mp3 stream, you must provide it with that stream.
    One of the programs that is provided with icecast is shout, which does playlists, and the other is called liveice, which can take either mp3 files or live input from your soundcard (line in)
    This could be used for live streaming...
    If you needed to broadcast from on location, you can stream from your laptop to the server, and then out to the internet from there..
    There will be a small buffer delay, but such is life...
  • Playing with it right now.. Talking and listining in headphones, about half a second delay...
  • You forgot Be, and MacOS is LESS stable then winblows. Be would be behind Linux (depend how you use it) and in front of NT4

  • Spend your money wisely... (Score:3)

    by chown ( 62159 ) on Friday October 08, 1999 @11:39PM (#1627668)
    A G4 probably is a bit of overkill, if you're streaming pre-compressed mp3's (which I assume you are), RAM is a lot more important than CPU. a PII -400 is enough to handle at least 600 simultaneous connections, as long as you have enough RAM (which would probably be 512MB to be safe). But if you want my advice, buy a nice layer-4 switch and have it do load balancing for you, and then have a series of celerons with 128-256MB RAM each, and if you ever need more power, you just plug another machine into the switch.
  • As much as I _hate_ NT, it is relatively stable, under the right conditions. Like running a single app on it. I was forced to use NT (damn politics) for the firewall and for an extranet server.Both of them haven't crashed yet, with an uptime around 3 months for the firewall. Of course, the same firewall software, running on a FreeBSD box I know of, has been up for around 2 years.
    Yes, NT sux, but mainly because you can't do any _real_ admin remotely, or for that matter, locally.
  • At school for mp3 streaming we set up a P2 350Mhz with 64mb ram and installed NT on it and it runs perfectly. Its up for months at a time unless we upgrade anything hardware like a hard drive, it never crashes, and is usually serving 100-200 connections at a time through shoutcast mp3 streamer (www.shoutcast.com). As much as the linux community would like to believe that NT is as unstable as Win95/98, it will never crash on you and is extremely stable and efficient.
  • I think you missed something very important there... They don't want to spend a lot of money. I'm sure NT has "student" pricing, but I don't know if it would even apply. The main crux of his question is "how can I get one big machine to do all of this?". NT misses the mark there unfortunately. As your message says, you just run shoutcast on it... No mail, no web. Oh well.

    I like the Athlon idea... but where can you buy one?
  • Well I don't own one but I was in Fry's today and they had a stack of about 15-20 of them...
  • Having a CPU powerful enough to encode well in realtime should be the most important factor. For low bit rates such as 24kbps (low enough to listen over a 33.6k modem--there is overhead to deal with so 32kbps is out of the question for 33.6k modems and 56k modems would be hit or miss depending on the listeners connection) the quality might not be that great. l3enc encodes 24kbps MP3's beautifully in high quality mode, but my K6-2-420 (oc'd) can't do it in realtime. None of the encoders that encode fast enough in realtime sound that great though (at 24k--a lot sound great at the higher bitrates.)

    Someone posted about the new Gogo encoder that supports MMX/3Dnow -- that may make a difference. I'm definately going to check that out. Of course this means an Intel/AMD solution rather than PowerPC.

    To the point: Try some different different encoders and see which gives you acceptable quality at the bit rate you'll be using. Which encoder works best will depend on the bit rate you choose. As far as the server, Icecast is open source and uses very little CPU. It's completely compatible with Shoutcast (even registers you on http://yp.shoutcast.com when you're broadcasting--the cool thing is that it registers you on multiple icecast yp.servers also.) Icecast outbenchmarked Shoutcast a lot when it first came out, but I can't find the benchmarks--things may have changed since then.

    Please avoid using something like Realaudio. Their support for Linux/Unix has been really lame in my opinion. They've only just released Realplayer G2 (alpha) for Linux.

    numb
  • Here at the University of Wisonsin the school of journalism has been streeming a live news show as a part of one of the journalism classes. I have been in close communication with the professor who has been doing the technical side of things.

    After quite a bit of research into possible solutions that he could brodcast, without worrying about legal issues... he came to the conclusion that an Apple solution was the cheapest, most usefull solution.

    They are using a 2 Mac solution, one to so the sorenson compression (this one is an older iMac running MacOS 8.6), and a second G3 (beige tower running MacOS X Server, and the free Quicktime Streaming Server). This solution is workign VERY well. As they have the show only for one hour durring the day, the setup is scritped so that the server starts up 5 minutes before the broadcast, straeams, and records, the broadcast at the right time, and then posts the recorded stream to a website that it modifies to suit, in case anyone missed the live broadcat.

    I tend to agree that you don't need a G4 to do the job. A pair of iMacs woudl do you just fine. Buy a copy of Sorenson brodcaster and pop it on one of them, and either go with LinuxPPC and the Darwin Streaming Server (a little bit of work to get it set up), or go with MacOS X Server (my recomendation), and you have an instant setup. Very reliale, and you can also stream video if you choose to do so.

    The only probem I would see is that there is currently no version of QuickTime 4 for Unix/Linux. Well.. there is the Java vrsion.. but.. For Windows amd MacOS users there will be no problems, and the streaming server can even be setup so that it will use MBONE, so that you don't trash the network if everyone happens ot be listning....

    That is my 2 cents worth.. good luck!
  • As much as the linux community would like to believe that NT is as unstable as Win95/98, it will never crash on you and is extremely stable and efficient.

    ..but I've heard several people claim that their Windows 95 boxen never crash, either. I've seen them crash on a more than daily basis myself, and have yet to hear an account from a strictly reliable source that claims an NT box to survive more than a week or two without crashing.

  • MP3 Streaming - on the cheap (Score:3)

    by Howard Beale ( 92386 ) on Saturday October 09, 1999 @02:42AM (#1627685)
    Here's a few things to check out-

    1) Go to www.icecast.org and use their GPL'd icecast and liveice software to do the broadcasting.
    2) The server horsepower depends on a few things: how many streams you want to run, are the streams mono or stereo and what encoder do you plan to use. Note that if you want to use one of the free encoders (such as LAME or one of it's patched versions), you won't be able to stream at less than 28.8kbps - you will need the Xing encoder at $19.95 or the Freanhoffer (?) at major $$. Note that the Xing uses MMX, which will give you a better encoding at the same CPU level, or a similar level of encoding quality at a lower CPU level.
    3) If you use the Xing encoder, you'll need to patch the icecast software to work around a problem with the Xing encoder. It's a small, minor change that makes a big difference.
    4) It doesn't make sense to run a high bit rate encoding if your listeners can't receive it. Don't encode a 28.8k signal for users unless they are using a minimum 56k modem. If they're using 28.8/33.6 modems, encode at 16k so they don't drop frames.

    To give you an idea, I set up an MP3 broadcast for a local minor league baseball team over the summer. I pulled the signal in from the local AM radio station (mono only) to my sound card's headphone jack. Liveice grabbed the input and passed it on to Xing. Xing encoded it and then icecast broadcasted it. The hardware I used was:

    Cyrix 200MX (o/c'd to pr-266) (Xing's MMX support made this work, otherwise go with AMD/Intel)
    32 MB Ram
    AWE 32 sound card
    4.3 GB IDE hard drive
    Xing encoder
    NE2k clone

    I streamed a 32k/44200 mono and a 16k/22100 mono signal at a CPU level of ~35%. This system was rock stable and managed easily. I set up a cron job to fire up just before the pregame program started, and stopped recording 4.5 hours later. I then moved a 'taped' version of the game over to a directory I set up for my web site so people who missed the game can download on demand and listen.

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