With Gandi servers, creating your own Web Radio is child's play. SHOUTcast is a software which facilitates the broadcast of music on the Internet. All you need to do is install a relay on your server and you're set!

To begin with, you need to download the server through SHOUTcast. Go to the official page at this address: http://www.shoutcast.com/download/, and download the latest version. At the time of writing it was version 1.9.8, but we're relying on you guys (the lovely Gandi community) to keep this kind of info up to date!

wget http://www.shoutcast.com/downloads/sc1-9-8/sc_serv_1.9.8_Linux.tar.gz

Once the download is complete, decompress the file in tar.gz format into the directory of your choice.

tar -xvzf sc_serv_1.9.8_Linux.tar.gz

Now that that's done, you'll have 3 additional files in the folder. Now we need to edit the configuration file

nano sc_serv.conf

No point in editing the configuration file too much for a “classical” use, just change the number of users, the password, the name of the radio and the like.

This time, the end (of this tutorial) is near. Cross your fingers and launch the server.

./sc_serv

Normally, when opening your web browser to http://your_servers_ip:8000 (8000 being the default port) you should see something like this:

The server is ready (but down)!

./sc_serv &

Creating a radio with Winamp and the SHOUTcast plugin is extremely easy. Start by downloading the latest version of Winamp as well as the plugin that can be found at this address.

Launch Winamp and go to options > Winamp preferences > DSP/Effect and select Nullsoft SHOUTcast Source DSP v1.9.0

Give the address of your server as well as the password you had previously defined in the conf file of your SHOUTcast server in the OUTPUT tab, and then choose the encryption type in ENCODER.

This time we're done, you can launch your playlist and start broadcasting. Your radio is now available at http://your_servers_ip:8000

Using Winamp isn't compulsory (but easier). It's also possible to broadcast your radio directly from your server.

Download the encoder onto your machine

wget http://www.shoutcast.com/downloads/sc_trans_posix_040.tgz

Once the download is completed, decompress the file in the desired location. A folder called sc_trans_040 will then be created.

tar xvzf sc_trans_posix_040.tgz

Open the freshly created folder, and edit the file called sc_trans.conf

cd sc_trans_040
nano sc_trans.conf

This is where you can change the encryption type, the server's IP address, the password, the radio's name, the music genre, if you want your radio to be referenced.

Import your music in a folder and create a playlist. In this example, the music will be uploaded to a folder called home/gandi. The following command will create a playlist called playlist_filename.lst

find /home/gandi/ -type f -name "*.mp3" > playlist_filename.lst

All that's left is to check that your SHOUTcast server works properly by launching the stream!

./sc_trans_linux

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