How To Set Up An Internet Radio Station From Your Computer Which Your Friends Can Listen To, Free!

What this article will do is teach you how to set up your computer so that whatever you hear from your speakers, your friends can also hear over the internet! It's a great way to share new music without file transfers. Be forewarned, however, as there IS a lag of about (in my experience) 30 seconds from what you hear, and what anyone else listening in will hear. Still, a great thing to do.

The first thing you'll need to download is Windows Media Encoder (Here, or Google it, there's a search bar conveniently placed at the top of the page). What this program allows you to do is broadcast the sounds being directed to your soundcard. The problem now, is that we need to push the sound to a server which will broadcast this to your friends, and give us a free url to give to them. For this, I will be using the free streamwebtown.com servers. They're free because they're a trial version of sorts, the only limitation being that every two hours, they go down for 10 minutes. So don't set this up during an even hour in the first 10 minutes : not 8:00-8:10. Anyway, to set this up, start up Windows Media Encoder, and choose Broadcast a Live Event. Press next, and make sure only audio is checked. Press next, and choose "Push to a Windows Media Server (the connection is initiated by the encoder)". Press next, and in the server name field, type in "streamwebtown.com", w/o quotes. For the publishing point, choose a unique name for yourself, this will be part of the url you give to your friends. Make sure it is unique, because if you choose something generic (aka bob), it might conflict with someone else. Leave everything else default. Press next, and select 135 and 70. Press next, and leave everything as is, it should NOT be saving an archive file (this will just take up space on your computer saving a sound file of what you're listening to). Press next and input whatever you want for these fields, aka for author, title, etc. Finally press next and finish. After this, it will ask you for a username and password. For username, type in User, and for password, type in Stream. It might lag for a good bit, but eventually it will pop up with a warning, just press okay. After all this, press start encoding at the top of the window. You are now broadcasting! Your friends can listen to your stream, live, at mms://streamwebtown.com/nameyouchosehere or http://streamwebtown.com/nameyouchosehere. (Warning: Works fine on Windows, Macs will need to use VLC to listen to it). Enjoy!