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setting up an internet radio station - Part 1: Hardware Selection

creating a web radio station doesn't require a lot of processing power



streaming radio station running on hp e-PC

Getting started with internet radio is possible with the regular hardware you might have stored away in your closet - an old Pentium 3 laptop or deskptop is perfectly fine to use for basic streaming. The real choke point in this process is not how much RAM or drive space you have but how much upstream bandwidth you have.

So with that in mind grab your old laptop or desktop - wipe it to remove all those old bugs and virii and start with a fresh install of XP / ME / 2000.

Sorry linux fanboys this is a windows tutorial. But you might be able to glean some good nuggets anyway. Here is a link to the Shoutcast source for *nix, unix, linux, posix - build it yourself!

Because I didn't want to tie up my main desktop for streaming I decided to purchase on old HP e-PC from eBay. Paid around $50 for it - find them on eBay HP e-PC on eBay These things are awesome for streaming - you don't need anything more than a Pentium 4 - and you can drop a massive drive into it for not a lot of money. The other nice thing as you can tell from the photo is that they have a small form factor (SFF) PC - about the size of a brick of printer paper - mine sits on a bookshelf out of the way. Other similar SFF PC's are Dell Optiplex SX260, SX270 and SX280. Any of those should work fine.



Step 2: Choosing Streaming Software >>


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