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I am trying to help my University Student Radio station rethink the setup of the way they stream music, but I have some questions regarding the use of Ubuntu to stream music. Currently, the radio station uses two windows machines: one of which is used to stream the radio station and serve the website, and the other is used by rotating djs to select songs and create playlists. The computer used by djs feeds mono into the sound card of the server and the server streams the feed online.

-Ideally I would like to maintain a two-computer setup: One computer as server, and another that is used to select and play music by rotating djs.

-I would like to use Ubuntu for the server.

-I would like to use Windows for the other machine.

-The server should be able to stream song information.

First, is there a way to somehow get the song information from an analog feed? Second, what is the best streaming server for radio? I have encountered shoutcast, icecast, and darwin, but I don't know where to begin in attempting to gauge them.

Finally, if anyone has any tips or pointers about small internet radio station management/ setup they would be appreciated as this is my first radio station, and I am eager to hear of past experiences.

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For me, shoutcast was always the prefered option, its widley supported and works really well...

I'm not sure if passing audio metadata like Artist/Title through analog would work at all...

Shoutcast was made by Nullsoft, the same people who make Winamp... so they work together. Winamp will ask you for the shoutcast server IP in which to connect to, so all you have to do is give it the IP/PORT number that shoutcast is running on your ubuntu box and Winamp should be able to connect from your Windows machine... all meta data about your playlist will be sent to the server this way.

There are other players out there that come with a shoutcast plugin - but I think Winamp is the best to use considering it was made by the same team as the Shoutcast server.

... having said that, OtsJuke DJ was the ultimate DJ Booth for Internet Radio, sadly it isn't free though.

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Shoutcast operates mostly on a single server module, so theres really no reason why who would need to separate dj / server, unless the DJ's want to use their own machines.

What you can do is configure the Ubuntu Shoutcast server as a relay. But as I said, dont really see the point.

As for Metadata, it will be transferred along with the audiostream (if i recall depending on the transport scheme it should just go in ID3 format :S ) but additionally the metadata can be web embedded. This Title Format can be changed to include some publicity or DJ data.

As always, RTFM, try it out, and report back! :D

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