The last week has been a hunt for me, to find a streaming mp3 server that I like enough to stick with.

At work, I have been lazy (Big shocker there). For the past many months I have just been using the free Launchcast from Yahoo to listen to music at work. I know the musicphiles out there wince at that, asiits mostly mainstream music. But i don’t to care too much at work, since I’m not “actively” listening, and they have enough songs I like to keep me happy. They have also greatly improved their discography in the last couple months. I was especially happy when they added most of the remastered Rush albums, which was one of my biggest pet peeves with the service. They cut me off on their free service though, as I had listened to too many that month.

So I looked for streaming mp3 servers. I had used edna many times in the past. Which worked well for 128kbit mp3s, but anything larger would skip badly. This is because my upload bandwidth is 384kbs (barely), and that can only carry 128kbit streams with any regularity. Recently I started using Streamsicle, which boatss a slicker web interface and will automatically generate playlists and start shuffling things when you don’t have anything chosen. This also had the bandwidth problem as well with higher quality streams.

So I started looking for downsampling/transcoding streamers. I didn’t really want to run a Shoutcast server, as I have done that in the past and was a bit too involved for my personal listening. I tried the ml_www plugin for Winamp. It is very nice that it is included into Winamp and can use the Media Library, but its web interface is slow and leaves much to be desired, and it doesn’t downsample.

Finally (after a few others that I looked into like Andromeda, Zina, Ampache, etc.) I tried one that I had looked into in the past but nver really tested it out fully. It’s called SlimServer. It is actually made to be used with their hardware called a Squeezebox, which will take music from your PC and play it through your stereo or whatever with a nice display. Luckily it also works like a charm for streaming to any PC, and they encourage it to be used that way. Best of all, it’s completely free. And, the clencher, is that it downsamples on the fly using LAME. You have to find install the LAME files yourself due to licensing issues, but that’s easily done. Not only does it downsample mp3s, but it will transcode from different compression types on the fly. I’ve tested it with FLAC and Musepack (mpc) and it will stream those as mp3 perfectly. This program is extremely easy to setup and has a nice little configuration menu on its generated webpage. It scans and categorizes your music very quickly and shuffles your playlists on the fly with each addition (I like that alot).

So, hopefully this saves someone some trouble in finding a good way to stream from home.

(I stress the one in someone!)