Streaming Audio: The FezGuys Guide

Although seemingly endless encoders are available for MP3, the most common encoders for RealMedia, Windows Media, and QuickTime are those made by the company behind each format. An online search for the word "encoder" using the Google.com search engine turns up hundreds of choices.

Each of the following handles both live and on-demand streaming for its format:

  • Windows Media Encoder (Microsoft) www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia. Windows. Live and on-demand.

  • RealProducer (RealNetworks) www.realnetworks.com/products/producer. Windows, Macintosh, Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris. Live and on-demand.

QuickTime Pro handles on-demand authoring for the QuickTime format. A number of other applications provide live QuickTime streams, a few of which are listed:

  • QuickTime Pro (Apple) www.apple.com/quicktime. Macintosh, Windows. On-demand only.

  • Sorensen Broadcaster (Sorenson) www.sorenson.com. Macintosh, Windows. Live QuickTime.

  • Coolstream (Evological) www.evological.com/coolstream.html. Macintosh. Live QuickTime.

  • Live Channel (Channel Storm) www.channelstorm.com. Macintosh. Live QuickTime.

MP3 has numerous products available to handle on-demand encoding, but for live streams, the choices are considerably less. For on-demand MP3 files, the two most popular encoding engines (also called "codecs" the part that does the actual encoding) are LAME and Fraunhofer. The company that creates the encoder usually licenses the Fraunhofer codec (it is packaged with the software). LAME usually needs to be downloaded separately (from www.mp3dev.org, where you can view the list of software that supports it).

Following are some common software tools to encode on-demand MP3 files:

  • AudioGrabber (Jackie Franck) www.audiograbber.com-us.net. Windows.

  • iTunes (Apple) www.apple.com/itunes. Macintosh.

  • Blade (Tord Jansson) http://bladeenc.mp3.no/. Windows/Macintosh/FreeBSD/Linux .

The following lists some common software and hardware tools to encode a live MP3 stream:

  • Winamp SHOUTcast Plug-in (Nullsoft) www.shoutcast.com/download/broadcast.phtml. Windows.

  • LiveIce (Icecast) http://star.arm.ac.uk/%7Espm/software/liveice.html. Linux/FreeSBD .

  • DarkIce (ákos Maróy) darkice.sourceforge.net. Linux/FreeSBD .

  • Xstream (Telos) www.telos-systems.com/?/zephyr. Dedicated hardware.

  • MaxxStream (Waves LTD) www.maxxstream.com. Dedicated hardware (running Windows).

For a considerable resource on MP3-related tools, check out http://software.mp3.com/software or http://www.mp3-encoders.com.

Batch encoders support a wide variety of formats to easily encode a group of on-demand files. Here are two of the more popular:

  • Cleaner5 (Discreet) www.discreet.com/products/cleaner/. Macintosh, Windows.

  • Barbabatch (Audio Ease) www.audioease.com/Pages/Barbabatch/BarbaMain.html. Macintosh.

Also, MP3 users might find the following batch ID3 tag editor handy, especially when working with batch encoders that don't support ID3 tag creation (such as Cleaner5):

  • Easy ID3 Editor (Audio Ease) www.software-innovations.net/id3. Windows.
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