Updated April 14, 1999
We talked to the team responsible for the radio feeds on the KISW Radio
Web site about how they use Windows Media Technologies. The team includes Bob Rivers, world-famous morning show DJ at KISW and creator
of the always hilarious and sometimes tasteless songs on TwistedTunes.com , Kelli Adam from ConnectOS Corporation , and former radio host Charlie Harger, who now works for Microsoft. Here are the steps they suggest you take to get your radio station feed on the Web.
- Get a good radio with digital tuning (locks in the station frequency).
- Place the radio in a location near your computer equipment where the signal
is strong and clear all day (even during rush hour, when you can experience
signal interference).
- Plug the radio output into the sound card on your computer. This is normally located on the back of your computer, where you plug in your speakers.
- Determine the bandwidth of each feed
you will offer. Will you offer only 28.8 Kbps feeds, or a variety to accommodate users on high-speed modems?
- Calculate how much bandwidth you'll need
by estimating the total number of concurrent connections you will have for each bandwidth. For instance, if you expect 100 people to be listening at any time, and the bandwidth of your audio stream is 16 Kbps, then you should anticipate needing 1600 Kbps.
- Get your system ready to record audio.
- Set up the Windows Media Encoder (available in the Windows Media Services Tools installation
),
once for each bandwidth content you plan to offer (for example, one for 28.8 Kbps, one for 56 Kbps, and so on).
- Set up the Windows Media Services.
- Create an ASX file.
- Add the feed to your HTML page or application.
Additional Tips & Tricks
- You can have multiple instances of the Windows Media Encoder on one computer. In this
configuration, we recommend using Windows® 95, since its Plug and Play architecture makes it easier to configure multiple sound cards, and more drivers are available for Windows 95.
- If you use Windows NT® for your encoder, be sure to lock the workstation to prevent someone from walking up to the box and logging in as themselves while the encoder is running. If they log in as a different user than the user the encoder was running under, the encoder session will stop and so will the radio station feed.
- It's a good idea to reboot the encoder computer weekly.
- Be sure to put the encoder on the same network segment as the Windows Media Services.
- For capacity planning purposes, we've found that a Pentium Pro 200 MHz computer with a 100 Mbps network interface card can accommodate up to 1,200 simultaneous 28.8 Kbps connections.
- We have tested two ANTEX Studio Cards in a single Pentium Pro 200 PC, which gives us up to eight encoders running at 20 Kbps.
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