Talk about low barriers to entry!
Whoa, I feel like a guineapig testbed experimenting with just how easy it is to setup a personal server with the Mac Mini. Everything is so easy, literally clicking buttons, and now I officially have my own internet radio station courtesy of Rogue Amoeba’s Nicecast player. This thing rocks! Here’s my setup:
- A network HD which stores all my tunes ripped with Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec
- Mac Mini connected to the netHD through SMB
- iTunes playing a Party Shuffle with desired settings
- Nicecast jacked into iTunes, transcoding (theoretically, though in reality probably just re-encoding) the stream to mp3 @ 160kbps
The obvious drawback is that I’m sucking up bandwidth just loading the tracks into iTunes; but that’s all running locally behind the router, so it has minimal effect on the mp3 stream.
Still, I can’t imagine an easier way to setup a personal radio station. While I realize this has been possible for quite some time, a number of factors – notably ease and cost – have likely prevented the ordinary Jane and Joe from setting up something like this (legal issues aside…) Talk about a threat to an industry; with Skype pressing forward too, the FCC most definitely has a rough road ahead.
March 8th, 2005 at 9:54 am
haha nice man, you gonna keep it going all the time? i bet you’ll be running into bandwidth problems soon enough, unless maybe you get a fiber optic connection. well, i guess it depends on how popular it becomes :)
March 8th, 2005 at 11:57 pm
You’re getting into all kinds of crazy stuff now! Cool!
Too bad you can’t do a live streaming with bit torrent type bandwidth dispersion. That would be wicked. Even a P2P broadcast station would be a cool idea don’t you think? Anonymous broadcasting! We’ll be the new champions of democracy! LOL
March 9th, 2005 at 1:25 am
hm, intersting idea Sam – “P2P/torrent broadcasting” would be interesting; basically anything that decentralizes the source, making it difficult for any single authority to police. Btw, is there a radio station out there for halvsies? :)
March 9th, 2005 at 4:35 pm
I don’t know of any halvsie radio stations aside from yours. I assume a heavy rotation of Crystal Kay and Amerie. :)
I suppose the challenge of dispersed broadcasting would be to obscure the main source while dispersing bandwidth load (without significant delay) at the same time.