Live Shows - What Do You Use?

[AndyCr15]

Currently I use WinAmps SHOUTcast, which is hosted on a local dedicated server, I send my transmission up to it, people connect to that and listen... but apparently there is about 1 minute delay between the actual show and what people can hear. This gets a bit tricky when people call in.

Can anyone recommend a better way of doing it? Thanks.

[lucky_groom]

You should be feeding your audio through the phone or Skype - whatever you are taking your calls with instead of having people listen to the radio to hear what you have to say before replying - that will eliminate the delay in the conversation. Your feed will still have that minute or whatever delay but your caller shouldn't be listening to the audio feed - that's why DJ's ask you to turn down the radio (at least that's one of the reasons).

[AndyCr15]

No, they do that. My point is, we're talking about one thing, then move on, then someone calls but they've not heard the latest subject or even they missed an answer we give, due to the delay... The main reason you ask people to turn down their radio's is to stop the feedback.

[Patrick]

With a good, fast, streaming host you won't have that big of a delay. We average about 15-30 seconds.

[RobOnt]

Currently I use WinAmps SHOUTcast, which is hosted on a local dedicated server, I send my transmission up to it, people connect to that and listen... but apparently there is about 1 minute delay between the actual show and what people can hear. This gets a bit tricky when people call in.

Can anyone recommend a better way of doing it? Thanks.

I've done the shoutcast thing, icecast and live365 thing. Right now we're encoding to a local shoutcast server from a dedicated simplecast workstation and our syndicating sites pick it up from there and rebroadcast it to live365 as well as their own icecast servers.

You're always going to get some delay. Get the fastest possible machine you can for your encoder and server machines. The shoutcast server really also benefits from more than one cpu (or dual cores work really well also) we're using a dual cpu machine with a shitload of ram and it works well. Since it's not local you're not gonna get the lag of broadcasting to an external server so really you're kinda stuck with the upgrade thing as far as I can tell. You may also wanna play around with Icecast and see if that gives you less lag. You may also want to try different encoding packages, simplecast works really well, SAM is great but pretty expensive, but there are lots of different software packages that do that stuff, it might be worth playing around with. The last thing is also your internet provider, if you're getting a ton of latency on your upstream all that stuff won't matter because you'll be limited by that. Unfortunately I guess what I'm saying is there's really no one quick fix, you have to look at everything you're using and address those issues individually.