Kasun's Tech Blog

SHOUTcast is an audio streaming sever developed by Nullsoft who owns the most famous media player Winamp . SHOUTcast makes it possible to inexpensively set up an Internet broadcasting station, so hobbyists and large radio network owners alike can use it to set up their own broadcasting network for a fraction of the cost of a traditional AM broadcasting or FM radio station.

Here, I’m not going to talk about its technical stuff, instead, I'm going to talk about how we can listen SHOUTcast radio stations and I’m using Amarok music player as a client which has built in support for the SHOUTcast. Amarok is one of the most popular music players for Linux boxes.  But you can use even Winamp(has built in support) or Windows Media Player(does not have built in support).

First open Amarok, then select “Playlists” from the left side bar as shown in following figure. Then click on the plus sign of “Shoutcast Streams” which is seen under the “Radio Streams”. It is important to mention that you have to have good internet connection since you are going to listen online radio streams :-)

After that you will see a list of stations which are categorized using their genre(See the following figure).

Click on the plus sign of one genre. Then you will see a list of online stations under that genre. The available stations for one of my favorite genres can be seen as follows.

Double click on one station. You will see one or more items in the current play list as below. Sometimes, you will see only one item for one station. These items represent streaming servers which you can connect and listen. Some stations use multiple streaming servers to reduce the load to one streaming server. You are free to connect any server. If you do not hear the station in a smooth way you can try another server.

I use my 512kbps ADSL line to listen online radio stations. As you can see in the following figure, the data-rate of the stream is 160kbps which is beyond the quality of an average MP3(128kbps). Moreover, I can still surf internet while downloading torrents on 30KB/s rate without interfering the radio stream. As I think, the main reason to be so is that the low latency in ADSL lines which may not quite cheep to obtain in other lines(i.e: Wi-Max, HSDPA).

If you right click on one stream you will see a dialog box as follows. You can use the url seen to use Windows Media player as a client.

(In Windows Media player, File->Open Url)

For the people who use windows, here is the way you can listen SHOUTcast radio stations using Winamp. Go to “MEDIA LIBRARY” and select “SHOUTcast radio” under the “Online Services”. Then select your favorite station and click “TUNE IN!”