What you need to create an internet radio
Today, creating an Internet radio station is available to everyone and does not require any special knowledge
In order to start creating an internet radio, you will need the internet and basic computer, internet browser, and audio file skills. If you are reading these lines, you probably have these skills
Contents
Even if this is your first time creating internet radio, this guide has answers to questions you may have. For starters, you should read the articles in this section and read about how Internet radio works, familiarize yourself with basic terms, learn about format selection, broadcast bitrate and number of slots, and decide which programs your station will broadcast from. For that, just read on.
How does Internet radio work?
Today, creating an Internet radio station is available to everyone and does not require any special knowledge. It is enough to have basic skills in working with the computer and the Internet. Nevertheless, if you decided to create your station and do it for the first time, it is useful to get acquainted with how Internet radio broadcasting works and consider the basic concepts.
Internet radio is based on streaming data over the Internet - see news on russian radio, for instance. This data can be, for example, music files or sound from a microphone. Let's understand how the simplest Internet radio broadcasting scheme works.
The Source is the audio stream that is broadcasted by the on-air program. The program can be our platform and any other specialized software (for example, RadioBoss and Sam Broadcaster). Such software encodes the audio stream and sends it to the server.
The server receives the stream from the source and distributes it to the listeners. The server manages the stream metadata (track names and other information), can create additional audio streams (for example, in a different bitrate), and generates statistics on listening to the streams (number of listeners and their locations). Icecast 2 is used as a server on our hosting.
Listeners receive the stream sent to them by the server and are able to listen to the radio station. Thanks to the Internet, the listener (just like the source and the server) is not tied to a specific geographical location: he can be anywhere in the world.
Source and server can be in the same place, or they can be located, for example, in different countries. For example, if you are going to broadcast from your PC to our hosting, the program on your PC will be a source, and our hosting will be a server which will distribute your stream to the listeners. In another example, when you broadcast from our control panel, our hosting is both the source and the server from which station listeners receive the stream. The server in both cases refers to the Icecast2 server that distributes the stream to the station's listeners.