cygweb

I'm still in the midst of getting all my thoughts together regarding my tutorial on cheap streaming audio, but I wanted to get an idea out and see what some of you thought of it.

First, note the new category on this post. I don't think there are a lot of people blogging about streaming audio, so I plan to do more of that. Probably more specifics than generalities.

Lately I've been thinking more about community building around streaming audio. There are drawbacks to trying to create a publicly available stream; the two largest are bandwidth and licensing. Keeping the stream private (whether through security or obscurity) limits the audience but holds legal issues in check. However, one person's programming (music and/or talk) probably won't appeal to everyone.

This is where my current idea comes in. Back in college I was exposed to a ton of new music by borrowing and listening to (and many times, taping) my friend's CDs. The melting pot is still bubbling today (at a low simmer); the medium is now digital music files. Applying this paradigm to streaming audio, I came up with this idea for an online "music club": (which enterprising college students with music, computers, software, and on-campus bandwidth have probably done, but perhaps I'm not giving myself enough credit):

• Launch a private streaming server, using an unpublished URL or a server that authenticates. (Since Icecast and free streaming clients don't support authentication yet, obscurity is the method I'm using.) Only club members will be provided the stream URL.
• Allow friends to participate in the club by uploading tracks they'd like to share with everyone else to their private home directory on the streaming server. Cap it to a relatively low number of tracks (say, 100 tracks or 500MB, whichever comes first) to encourage them to cycle their music every once in a while. The music files should be tagged with accurate info, and can also include items like artist web links and purchase links that could possibly credit the club member with a sale.
• A periodic process will populate a playlist using equal amounts of tracks from each member. A "recently played" artist/song history will be enforced to maximize variety.
• The playlist will be used as the stream source, pleasantly crossfaded and available 24/7. Members tune into the stream whenever they want, and can also check out a website that provides info about the most recently played songs (including artist & purchase links if available, and perhaps other metadata). The participant who shared the track would also be noted.
• A forum or mailing list could be used to discuss things related to the club.
• Future features could include things like allowing members to vote for tracks they like, with the feedback influencing playlist frequency for highly-rated tracks.

If this interests any of you, please post. I'm willing to host such a service, since I've got about 90% of the required infrastructure done. I have bandwidth limitations, but on a small scale (10 participants or less) this would probably work fine. Going forward would certainly require more specification (acceptable codecs/bitrates/tags/clients) but it can all be done with free software.