Internet Radio 3

Testing in the Lab

We brought the labtop to the computer lab to test it out. First we had to register the mac address of the laptop in the DNS. We plugged into the free Z port near the instructor workstation and booted up. We then ran cmd and at the > prompt typed ipconfig /all to determine our IP address which was 129.100.35.254 today.

All the MP3 files are in a file called CONTENT in the Winamp directory although they could be anywhere.

We ran Winamp and clicked the ADD button and added that folder into a playlist. We can now arrange the content into the desired order - mixing longer speeches or music with short adverts or sound effects or canned carts like 'You're listenting to Bill and Marty on KBBL'. This allows the producer or DJ to design their own show. We saved this to a playlist file called playlist.M3U and started the show playing.

Next we ran the win32 version of icecast. (maybe we should do this first before playing the list!) which started streaming the audio.

We then fired up one of the lab machines and tested out the web interface by going to http://129.100.35.254:8000 and the web screen is displayed with the menu options of Administration | Server Status | Version. We clicked on the Administration menu option and verified it requires a username and password (which we had set up in the icecast.xml file) to log in.

We start the stream playing and the status menu shows up we are listening to the Giants of Philosophy series. So far so good. The only negative is it is playing in the horrid Windows Media Player but that is the default on windows machines so what can you do...

Next we fired up another lab workstation and ran Internet Explorer and went to http://129.100.35.254:8000 but got cannot display the web page and in Firefox we got a network timeout.

The problem is likely that our server is only accepting 1 connection? We changed some of the defaults in icecast.xml so we need to look at that, make some changes and try again.

Also we had logged in as ourselves on two workstations although that should not really make a difference.

Time for some lunch...and maybe we should look at the documentation...where we see:

"A mountpoint is a resource on the icecast server that represents a single broadcast stream. Mountpoints are named similar to files (/mystream.ogg, /mymp3stream). When listeners connect to icecast2, they must specify the mountpoint in the request (i.e. http://192.168.1.10:8000/mystream.ogg)"

I think we used a mountpoint the first time we did this so we try http://129.100.35.254:8000/stream.mp3 and it loads the Quicktime player. The spinner is going and going..

We go to the admin interface and log in and looks like we need to spend some more time in the config and documentation.

More tomorrow...