[icecast] using a web server?

[Michael Grant]

This is a stupid question...

Why would one use a streaming audio server versus just a web server to 
stream static files like a juke box?

Here are some reasons I came up with:

1) A web server won't concatinate songs together, but if someone is
only downloading say a one-off clip, perhaps a web server is exactly
what is needed

2) Titles (or rather meta-data) don't get inserted into the stream,
though they could somehow be inserted into the file ala shoutcast
style

3) icecast seems to pace sending out it's packets so as to not overrun
the receiver.  This doesn't seem necessary since tcp does this
automatically.  Perhaps it doesn't do this and I'm reading the code wrong.

So, aside from these reasons, why would someone put up a streaming
audio server to stream static files (i.e. click here to listen to this 
song, rather than listening to a concatinated stream)?

I know some of you folks out there have put together perl scripts and
php scripts to do a sort of juke box with icecast, I'm just wondering
what the reasoning is.

-Mike

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