Streaming MP3's over internet
deicist
Manchester, UK
Not sure if this is even possible, but I can't see why not....
I'm sat at work very bored, and decided I want to listen to some music. Now, at home I have around 50GB of MP3's that I'd like to listen to.... but that's at home, not here. What I'd like to do is somehow stream those MP3's (through a pre-defined playlist on the server at home ideally) to my work PC. At the moment I'm using RDP, which is working.... but the sound keeps dropping out, obviously due to my crappy 30KB/s upload speed. I'm not particularly bothered about quality, so if this streaming software could somehow re-encode the MP3's on the fly so they work at 30K (or less) but still sound like what they're supposed to that'd be perfect. Anyone got any suggestions?
I'm sat at work very bored, and decided I want to listen to some music. Now, at home I have around 50GB of MP3's that I'd like to listen to.... but that's at home, not here. What I'd like to do is somehow stream those MP3's (through a pre-defined playlist on the server at home ideally) to my work PC. At the moment I'm using RDP, which is working.... but the sound keeps dropping out, obviously due to my crappy 30KB/s upload speed. I'm not particularly bothered about quality, so if this streaming software could somehow re-encode the MP3's on the fly so they work at 30K (or less) but still sound like what they're supposed to that'd be perfect. Anyone got any suggestions?
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If that's not enough yet, you can get a ShoutCast plugin for Winamp. I think it lets you select what bitrate it broadcasts in. I'm almost positive it works like that... and if it does, that would mean it would transcode to 128 (or whatever you set it to) and send that, but NOT mess up your original files. I think. Still... transcoding takes away a lot of quality, as you're going from lossy > "lossless" > lossy. That's a lot of data that gets mangled.
But I s'pose, like you said, it's just for listening temporarily, and some music is better than none. Give it a shot, see how it works
http://www.shoutcast.com/
EDIT: Oh your so quick Entropy!
I used shoutcast from home when I used to do an online talk show. I'd play music in between my talking fits. I usually had like 5-10 people listening in so I couldn't use my DSL's 256k upload so I'd upload to a shoutcast server at like 128k and people could tune in by connecting to the server. I had two streams, one at 48kbps for dial up listeners, the other at 128kbps for broadband people. Now if you do it this way, it's gonna cost you, you have to pay a usage fee each month. However since you're going to be the only listener, you can probably broadcast out from your computer at 128kbps and not ever get any dropout. Keep in mind that you'll probably have to kill any P2P apps during the day otherwise you'll have to broadcast out at 32kbps and your music will sound like it's coming out of a telephone, in other words it'll sounds really crappy. But then again you might really have acquired 50GB of MP3s legitimately and you don't ever run P2P apps. Who knows?
Anyways, click here to read up on how to do it, and click here to download everything you need to get it done. You'll need to download both the Shoutcast DSP plugin and the Shoutcast server and install them both on your home computer to start broadcasting.
Like I said I used to do this all the time, consider myself somewhat of an expert on it, so if you need any help, please don't be afraid to send me a PM on the forums here. Oh one more thing, you'll need to mess with your sound levels to get it just right, but one step at a time.
Cant you just bypass the ISA filter with the ISA FW client?
By the way, I completely forgot to have a look at shoutcast over the weekend.... bah