Site of the Week Vol 6 :: Shoutcast – Find, Listen or Create Online Radio Streams

If you like music and own a pc, chances are you know Nullsoft. Rings a bell hey? They’re the guys who brought us the hugely popular Winamp Media Player, the skinable and fully customizable open source media player that had every thirteen year old music lover thinking he was Carl Cox because he could mix two tracks together with the click of a mouse and a few plugins.

Well now AOL owns Nullsoft, yet its many cool services, sites and products are still available and better than ever, Shoutcast is one of these sites/services. Wikipedia has this to say about Shoutcast ,”SHOUTcast consists of a client-server model, with each component communicating via a network protocol that intermingles audio data with metadata such as song titles and the station name. It uses HTTP as a transport protocol, although multicast is another option.”

Yeah, so basically its got alot of cool free web based radio stations you can browse, and of course listen to for free. It works seemlessly with Itunes on Mac (what I used), and I’m sure on PC as well. Not only does it let you find and listen to online radio stations but it also lets you release the inner Disc Jockey hiding in all of us. You can also create your own online radio station and broadcast it to the world.

Its extremely easy to use and with the state of South African radio leaving much to be desired, a site like shoutcast or musicovery can make all the difference.

How to get it going (Listening)

1. Go to shoutcast here
2. Either search for a station or browse by Genre (Lets try electronic)
3. Wait want even more specific genre choices? Click the little yellow + next to electronic
4. Lets try some electro
5. After you have selected elctro a long (76 Page) list will appear.
6. Browse the list and select your choice (Notice that it tells you the currently playing track)
7. A file will download, select it and itunes or another compatible player will open and begin streaming
8. Enjoy

How to get it started (Broadcasting)

If you want to look into starting your own station look here for some more info, its really quite simple.

1. Download & install Winamp
2. Install the Shoutcast plugin & activate it.
3. Anything being played on your winamp player is broadcasted to the world.
4. And you’re famous!

If you enjoyed Shoutcast you may also enjoy one of our previous Site of the Week :: Musicovery. Got any feedback, advice, favourite stations, or maybe you started your own station etc post it below!

Dont Party – You’ll get warts on your hands.

Posted on 18 January 2010 by The Informer