[icecast] playlist streams

[Adon Irani]

>
> We will have thousands of 24 hour playlists generated everyday by
> software I'm developing.  If we encode all our audio files at 32kb/s,
> could we not just supply a link to the playlist files directly on our
> server.  So in effect, our server is just acting like a hard disk and
> listeners are playing the files directly.  Would this work?

you mean you have a pool of .ogg/.mp3 files ( perhaps an open po0l with
personal folders, etc ) . and you want to generate a playlist to a select
few or more of these files .. so that a listener will tune in at a certain
time, and listen to whichever types of songs you've decided for that time
.

you don't want to do live simulcast sh0ws , correct? .. just offer 24-7
music ( which will change depending on the time ) . you don't want to have
actual radio shows w/ song intro's , etc . .

this you can certainly do . instead of having icecast generate the .m3u
file , you could do this through php . for instance ,, if you listen to a
stream on http://theDV8network.com , you'll notice a counter index and the
source ip in the .m3u - basically ;i'm tracking this info in sql , and
then generating a custom playlist file in the icecast webro0t dir . i then
have a webpage with a meta http refresher to load the custom m3u file .

o your website/proggie can definately generate a playlist on the fly . it
would be more difficult to alter the playlist in real-time however ..
though i'm sure it could be managed .

<p>>
> What I also envisage is writing software that continually trims songs
> from the top of the playlists as time goes by throughout the day so new
> listeners will start listening at roughly the scheduled time.  The only
> problem I can think of is file security.  Is there any way to prevent
> the individual songs from being downloaded?

if you have all the songs registered in a database , you could have an
already played index to track this ; and generate a rand0m song list and
filter out those tracks already played . and have different logics for the
different time of day .

,and i don't think the streams CAN be downloaded if the links are .m3u .
but i'm sure someone else can say more on this . (i'm told that winamp
does have a ripper plugin ).

>
> As an alternative, am I right in assuming IceCast is capable of
> providing streams directly from playlist files?  Is there any other
> major advantages of using Icecast compared to the direct access method
> above?

if you're not live encoding , icecast prolly still has performance
advantages over other on-demand streamers ( mod_mp3 for apache ,etc )..
but icecast also supports ogg vorbis which is a superior audio format on a
number of measures .

<p> a:/,

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