Polaris Digital Radio on DIB
Today Polaris Digital began broadcasting our studio playlist to the world using a Digital Internet Broadcast (DIB). We’re currently broadcasting at 128kbps at 44KHz, although depending on the popularity I might have to lower the quality.
I have been playing with Internet Broadcasting for a while now, albeit on our local network. Unfortunately we only have a 8Mbp/s connection to the web, and that’s downstream. Upstream we barely get 400Kbp/s which would be just enough to carry two streams, with not much left over for anything else.
The answer to this problem is to place the live broadcasting server locally and then place a relay server on our internet server, located in Germany on a very very fast 10Gbp/s link. With that kind of bandwidth I can support well over a 100 listeners.
The way the system currently works is as follows. Locally on my desktop machine I have a local copy of iTunes running with NiceCast broadcasting to the world. This broadcast is picked up by ShoutCast on my live server, which is the one you’re all connecting too. Imagine my desktop is the the studio and the Polaris Digital web server is a satelite, my desktop machine is uplinked to the satelite that then re-broadcasts to anyone who points their dish (music player) in the right direction.
So from 9am to 9pm every day you can listen live to the music we’re playing out, and we’ll take requests too, if you leave them as a comment on this post. We will also be accepting your own content/programming to schedule in the coming months, more on that soon.
Our current playlist includes: Soulwax, Faithless, Fat Boy Slim, Morcheeba, Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, Dusted, Chemical Brothers, Roots Manuva, Beethoven, Fun Loving Criminals, Mint Royale, Hot Chip, The Zutons, Gomez, David Bowie, Nina Simone, The Pogues, Tenacious D, Groove Armada, Radiohead, Mark Ronson, Queens of the Stoneage, Led Zepplin, The Streets, The White Stripes, The Prodigy, Orbital, Suede, Rage Against The Machine, The Gossip, The Rolling Stones, Joan Armatrading, Marlena Shaw, and many many more.
To listen you need to have iTunes, or MP3 player that can stream music (WinAmp, RealPlayer, MusicMatch, etc.) and then either click here, or enter this link into your player of choice : http://www.polaris-digital.net:8000/listen.pls
My next post will be a detailed account of how to set your own internet radio station if you have a setup similar to mine, but I’ll add a section for all the Windows users as well.
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