Internet Radio

[godman]

Has anyone ever tried to broadcast their show via internet radio like shout cast or other internet solutions?

 

I know about using the FM transmitter but I was just thinking about technology and how it can probably be used to let people listen on their smart phones instead of just their car radio.

 

Thoughts?

[George Simmons]

Don't smart phones have apps for FM radio?

[Aaron Maue]

I have never tried it, but I'd be worried about the latency in an Internet-based solution. Your eyes will detect even a small delay between the lights and the audio. You'd want to test it before relying on it, especially since there are more variables to consider that are outside your control (potential loss of your internet connection, bandwidth - both your upload speed and all users' download speeds, overall network traffic depending on time of day and day of week, etc.)

As you can tell, I'm skeptical, but I'd be interested to hear any results you can share if you do some testing. And it wouldn't be the first time someone proved me dead wrong. Good luck if you give it a shot.

[godman]

@George, I'm sure there are FM Apps, I was thinking something simple like going to my website and clicking a link to go to the broadcast rather than having to ask someone to download an app

 

@Aaron, those are excellent points.

[habmann]

I played with this a little bit last year and found that there was a pretty sizable lag between what was playing on the computer I was broadcasting from and what was playing on the internet station. I think it was just a product of the time it took to upload from the computer to the internet station.

 

It seemed like a cool idea, but I quickly moved on to other things as I just didn't see anyway to overcome the lag issue.

[k6ccc]

Forget about it.  The delay would be WAY beyond a killer.  I've been streaming scanner radios with various methods for well over a decade and all of them add enough delay that would make it totally unacceptable for a light show.  I'm talking seconds at a minimum up to several 10s of seconds depending on what applications are being used.  All of the streaming audio applications assume that there will be dropouts and at the very least add a substantial buffering delay to be able to cover those dropouts.

 

As someone else pointed out, there are a lot of variables that are totally out of your control.  If you are going to try, to help minimize that, I would recommend that you have an open WiFi that is on the same LAN as your show computer so at least you are not having the phone deal with cellular delays.  I would NOT have this open WiFi on your normal home LAN since that would create a massive security hole.

[mixnight]

The risk of having a delay is high, I do web pages and I do sell radio streaming plans to broadcast live or via auto Dj and for real the delay exist and it can be from seconds to minutes depending on the broadcaster connexion and the listener connexion, server hosting and even with a high speed internet.

Best solution for LOR lights shows is fm radio. Any way, you can choose what you want to use.