Personal Use FLAC Streaming Solutions?

Kulaid982 asks: "A friend of mine has challenged me to put together an internet music server for him. Ideally he'd like to stream music from his apartment to work. I'm aware of mod_mp3 for Apache, and Shoutcast seems to be a great streaming option, however, most of his music is FLAC or WAV. Obviously, .wav files are only streamable over the fastest networks, so is there an option for on the fly encoding to MP3 or FLAC to stream it? This will be a dedicated music-streaming box for his own personal use. I'm sure someone out there has already done this or something similar, so please share; how'd you pull it off?"

"Some technical specifics: The box is a P3 800 with 512MB of RAM, so I'm thinking Linux over Windows; his internet connection is 3 Mbps down, 256kbps up; and his collection is ~400GB, and is a mix of WAV, FLAC, and SHN (SHORTEN) formats."

Re:Use...

[keeleysam]

5 is too bloated and 3 is too buggy

some solutions

[Sithgunner]

I have a music server setup at my parents' home with tons of music encoded as flac, and I live at another place by myself and I listen there over the internet, so I don't even have to keep a single CD myself.

What I did may not help you directly, because this is a UNIX method, but if you do have UNIX, then try running nfs over those 2 points (Yes, if you really want to, put Cygwin on Window machines and you can mount them just fine or there is Service For Unix from Microsoft for free.)

Nfs is the best network filesystem that preserves the bandwidth over network imo (I run 100mbps up/down on both location and it keeps the bandwidth just fine over nfs. smb and rest just somehow cuts down the bandwidth, but may still run enough bandwidth for flacs)

But you can also try to put VPN against those 2 machines (if you got a WinXP Pro on one side, I think you can set it up as VPN server, that is if your network at your work allows the traffic), and have the home local drive exported as Windows share and mount it on the other side.

If you still can't have it done, maybe the easiest in terms of getting it up for the network is running Apache web server at home.

Once you get Apache running and have the music folder viewable from outside (maybe you want to put some password protection or something), you can just launch foobar2k or winamp and make it access to your server via global ip and have it streamed.

This is only like accessing another web server in the world, so it is very unlikely that you get network restriction.

If your IP is dynamic, you can consider getting a service like www.no-ip.com so you can have a consistent name along with your changing IP, so you can access without problems.

Hope one of it works for you.