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Communications Media Music Hardware

PC FM Tuner Streamed Over a LAN? 67

Posted by Cliff from the better-quality-sounds dept.
ooglek asks: "FM radio seems to be falling out of favor, with many stations putting their streams online. Unfortunately, many choose bad codecs and low bandwidth feeds, which make them practically unappealing. There seem to be a fair number of PCI-based TV Tuner cards that come with a built in FM receiver, and I'm interested in what it might take to stream my local FM stations to the Windows, Unix and Mac boxes in my house over my LAN, as well as my TiVo and Slim Devices SqueezeBox. Is this merely a pipe-dream?"
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PC FM Tuner Streamed Over a LAN? More

PC FM Tuner Streamed Over a LAN?

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  • i was just listening to fm today after listening to web radio pretty much exclusivly. 5 minutes later I realize I'm picking up two stations at the same time, which is why it sounded so weird. Why not just improve web radio, if its bad it can be upgraded.

  • I Don't Get It (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Criliric ( 879949 ) <Shane.belaire@gmail.com> on Friday January 06, 2006 @08:46PM (#14413829)
    Doesn't anybody else have a receviver these days?
    instead of stereo into the computer I happen to have it the other way around, and if I really wanted to listen the local rock station all I have to do I press a button.
    I might be missing something but what is the point of having your computer play your radio, unless you plan on recording the banter of the DJs....
    • i listen to howard stern daily. a radio won't work in my office, but i could easily stream from home and tune in with xmms over the net
      • Just record some asshole saying "fuck", "breasts", and "midget". Then play those sound clips randomly with a laugh track (make sure there's at least one black female laughing) in the background, perhaps with "lesbian" interjected periodically. It will be funnier *and* more insightful than Stern, but it's as close as a computer can come. Replace the laugh track with NPR for 5 minutes every half hour.
    • Once you've streamed it from wherever, you could output it to an FM transmitter and listen to it on the radio. This might confuse the neighbours if you're streaming it in from outside the local area (and annoy the authorities if you use too much power).
    • Doesn't anybody else have a receviver these days?

      Sure, it's upstairs in the living room on the opposite side of the house.
  • ..is new again.
    I am a bit troubled at this trend towards paying recurring fees to do things that have been essentially free for decades. First OTA broadcast TV, now cable. Then radio, now Sirius.
    When my children are my age opening up the fridge will be a subscription service. It will be called Digi-Chill 5000(r). I just copywrited that, so no stealing it in 30 years.
    • The flip side is that subscription cable channels like HBO, or subscription digital radio, are not driven by commercials, and so are arguably better geared towards giving you (the customer) what you would like to see. "Free" services, like broadcast TV or radio are geared towards giving their advertisers (their customers) what they want (your eyes and ears).

      You ARE correct that the recurrant cost for "basic" CABLE which is mostly simulcast of broadcast TV, breaks that model a little. It would perhaps have
      • Are you telling me that most cable stations are ad-free? Bullshit. Cable may have started out that way, and digital radio will not be far behind.
        • i doubt it. well, i doubt pay radio will get as bad (comparatively) as pay television

          the costs associated with producing television content are drastically higher than the costs associated with producing radio content. what's radio content? most stations (or channels on the sat services) are just computer generated/managed music playlists that require little human intervention. talk formats don't demand nearly as many human resources as their television counterparts
          • "the costs associated with producing television content are drastically higher than the costs associated with producing radio content."
            They may be higher but why do they need to be so expensive?
            Digtal video has dropped the cost of producing video. You can get a good digital camcorder for around $2000 "Cannon GL2". There is open source Digital Video editing software. Blender and Gimp for titling and rendering...
            Actors are not that expensive. Most of the costs have to do with the production companies.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Reminds me UBIK by Philip K. Dick, one of the characters lives in a conapt where you have to pay your door for it to open..
    • Oooh, looks like there's going to be trouble since your Digi-Chill 5000 is very similar to my Digi-Cool 6000. Of course, mine must be better due to the higher number.

  • Use Nicecast (Score:3, Informative)

    by TTop ( 160446 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @08:52PM (#14413895)
    Capture the FM audio with your tuner card on a Mac. Then use Nicecast [rogueamoeba.com] to stream it. Nicecast can basically stream any audio on your Mac.
    • I am having the hardest time figuring out how the parent got modded troll. It was a serious response when he had mentioned he has a Mac on his network, and nicecast is a very good web streaming software that could be connected to by any of his other systems (iTunes if you like, winamp, xmms and really any other media player can handle the stream from nicecast). Yet.. because he mentions the Mac option from his network, he's a troll.. right..
  • The thing is, the radio station has a clean signal to work with. Compression algorithms will work relitively well with that, but if you use the audio that comes from F.M. it will introduce alot of noise. This won't work as well as with the clean signal and in the end you'll probably have use more bandwidth just to broadcast the same audio at about the same quality.

  • USB radioshark + icecast + liveice (Score:5, Informative)

    by zfalcon ( 69659 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @08:55PM (#14413928)
    I just set this up the other day so I could listen to local sports broadcasts when out of town.

    I bought a USB Radioshark [amazon.com], set it up under Linux [linuxquestions.org], and used Icecast [icecast.org] with Liveice [arm.ac.uk] to setup realtime streaming.

    I then setup a cgi to change stations. Works like a charm.

    • I agree Icecast or Shoutcast is the best way to go, you can take almost any input and then stream it as a normal mp3 stream. I've done this with both my mp3 collection and input from my music channels on the cable box.

      I use it to listen to MP3s at work streaming from my home box. Or if you get board you can be your own DJ on shoutcast.com ;)

  • Kinda OT: I remember doing this many moons ago (Score:4, Interesting)

    by szyzyg ( 7313 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @08:58PM (#14413949)
    I'd got snapped up from my astronomy position in the UK to come and contract for a couple of months in the US, I'd been developing software like mp3serv/liveice/icecast. But, I didn't want to leave behind UK radio - like the Essential Mix, John Peel or The Breezeblock - the BBC website offered low quality real audio. I left my radio plugged into my computer at the observatory and streamed all the UK radio across the atlantic to my office in the US....

    Sadly... I don't have an office in the UK any more so I guess my best bet now is Sirius radio.
  • I believe Beyond TV 4 can do it. Or at the very least, record shows which then become available for streaming over the web interface on port 8129.
  • VideoLan Client (bad naming, but it can both receive network streams and originate them) http://www.videolan.org/ [videolan.org] They even have precompiled clients for most popular OSes and distributions.
  • 1. A Mac Mini (you'll understand why in a minute.)
    2. A USB FM Tuner (that's supported by the Mac). Google. There's a few out there.
    3. NiceCast, (or Air Foil) from Rogue Amoeba. www.rogueamoeba.com

    Simple. Seamless. That's the beauty of the Mac. :-)
  • This is slightly off topic, but just the other day I submitted an ask slashdot asking how it might be possible to stream my entire audio session from one PC to another. My main desktop has no soundcard, no space to put one, and no speakers; my Media center PC has all of those, but I don't use it as my main PC. I'm looking for a solution that will allow me to stream the audio from my main desktop to my Media Center and play it there. (They're in the same room, just beside each other, for intrests sake) Any i

  • Put a radio on top of your PC (Score:5, Informative)

    by SIGFPE ( 97527 ) on Friday January 06, 2006 @09:49PM (#14414304) Homepage
    I assure you it sounds fine. Well, you might want to move it slightly away from your PC to avoid interference. If you want to listen in many rooms buy a radio for each one - they're pretty cheap. Or buy a portable radio that you can carry with you.
  • So far all the replies have been technical in nature, but let us not forget we live in a very legalistic society. I don't think you can legally stream broadcast radio over the internet withouth re-broadcast rights etc.. So before going through all this hassle to set this up, how about checking the legal ramifications first.

    Just a thought.
    • That was my first thought as well. With new technologies like GNU software radio [gnu.org], the lines between "rebroadcasting" and "using" can become blurred.

      I definitely have the right to use anything within the confines of my house. But, if I setup an antenna and let my neighbors connect their radios to it, am I "rebroadcasting"? If I setup a GNU radio box and send the (undecoded) signals out over the internet, am I "rebroadcasting"? What if I only send them to myself?

      And, more importantly, why should radio and

  • Easy. (Score:1)

    by mebob ( 57853 )
    I've been doing it for a while. I steamed 92.3 formerly WXRK, home of Howard Stern to work pc all the time. Now I really don't have a reason too.

    I use an old ISA card called radiotrack and a shoutcast server.
  • Seriously, FM radio isn't exactly pristine quality to begin with.

    I'd think even common 64kbit MP3 streams from a clean source at the radio station would probably sound better than a high bitrate stream generated locally from the noisy distorted signal you could receive over the air and digitize.
    • At least in the UK, analogue FM radio is much better than that. Recently, a digital standard has been introduced for radio (DAB). Unfortunately, it is so compressed (128kbit MP3 level) that hifi people are sticking with the far better analogue signal, which approaches (and perhaps even surpasses) CD quality, if you have a decent receiver and a rooftop aerial. "Decent receiver" is not a PCI card inside a box of noisy electronics, though!
    • You can also receive most local radio stations over FM on the cable company's signal -- at least in my part of the woods. It's pretty good quality -- far better than over the air, and probably better than the low-bit rate MP3 streams.
  • Orb streamign software [orb.com] They have/offer a free streaming server/client thingie (for both video and audio)... I realize that's only part ofthe solution, but hey..

    The rub with most TV card FM tuners (unless i'm mistaken) is that you can't concurrently use the FM tuner and the TV tuner (often they share the same ADC or mpeg2 encoding "bus" )

    I've been thinking of doing the same thing except re-encoding sirius/howard for personal use/personal podcasting/timeshifting but only looked at what's involved quickly...

    e
  • There's two main options. VLC will stream anything, simple as day, its fan-freaking-tastic. Really, VLC streaming is just superb.

    On the other hand, there's icecasting/shoutcasting. you should be able to get a JACK stream from the FM tuner, in which case you can pickup Oddsock's Oddcast to stream it to an Oddcast/Icecast server; the server will require editing a couple lines of an xml config to get running properly but its not hard. There's plenty of other options for streaming to Icecast, I just happen
  • C'mon, let me just suck in the whole band from 88-108MHz and separate the stations in software. Then I'd only need one "tuner" for a whole fleet of clients, and everybody could pick their own program.

    And monitoring every station's RDS feed simultaneously would be a fun trick.
    • C'mon, let me just suck in the whole band from 88-108MHz and separate the stations in software.

      You mean like with GNU Radio [comsec.com]? It sounds like it would take some real DIY (or expensive) hardware and probably not insignificant CPU cycles, but it would be cool.

  • New Ask Slashdot Requirement (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dave1g ( 680091 ) on Saturday January 07, 2006 @02:40AM (#14415461) Journal
    This is actually an interesting question and so were some others in the past.

    I think the submitters should be force into developing a simple webpage that details what they did based on the knowledge slashdot gave them.

    Heck, they could put it on ehow.com they have a wiki how to website http://wiki.ehow.com/Main-Page [ehow.com]
    • Agreed, that would be helpful. I would be interested in quickly documenting some things I figured out myself, but to do that I would like to have some Wiki or Blog service that allows uploading files as well.

      Do any of those exist?

      X.
  • I have a Squeezebox myself and I've thought about doing this. Actually, I'd like to get rid of my stereo system as a whole and just use the Squeezebox with powered speakers.

    I've asked this question on the Slim Devices list and the answer was that, no, the slimserver doesn't do this (that would be best), but it can be done with IceCast (or any other package that does shoutcast streams). The Squeezebox and most other systems can play shoutcast MP3 streams so that would be the solution.

    You could write a nice P
  • Probably not quite what you want, but I've used an Instreamer [barix.com] before to digitise audio and distribute it across a LAN. It's not exactly cheap but works well and simple to use.

    Otherwise, you could write / find some software to suit (I ended up writing my own). All I did was write a simple app that fed raw PCM data across a UDP socket and some playback software at the other end. With less than 20ms overall latency it was pretty good for near realtime usage, and used a very small amount of bandwith (8kHz

  • Currently doing it with XM (Score:3, Informative)

    by irrelevant ( 66554 ) * on Saturday January 07, 2006 @11:53AM (#14416858)
    Right now, I'm doing this with my XM receiver (shh... don't tell them) to tune and stream audio throughout the house. I used to do this for FM as well but the server that was running it crashed and I haven't gotten around to redoing that part yet.

    Why do it for XM? I like to listen to music anywhere in the house and I don't want to pay multiple subscription fees. Why for FM? The main reason was to get the audio into the computer and converted to MP3 so that I could record a few programs that I like and listen to them later. Streaming was just an added bonus for me at that time.

    The basics of what you will need are:
    1. An FM tuner card
    2. Software for tuning (depends on card)
    3. aumix for twiddling mixer settings
    4. Darkice to read audio from the card
    4a. Lame, or other CODEC of choice (optional)
    5. Liveice to stream audio to clients
    6. A little bit of fiddling to make it all work.

  • "FM radio seems to be falling out of favor, with many stations putting their streams online."

    Uh-huh. Tell that to radio sales department where I work, I'm sure they'll get a kick out of hearing the service they give away as added value is supplanting the over-the-air signal which pays everyone's mortgage. Streaming has been a burden for most radio stations which make little, is any, money from it. FM is a highly efficient and cost effective means honed over decades to distribute 'music-data' from a single

  • I have sort of a similar question. Yahoo still hasn't provided LAUNCHCast support for Safari/ Macintosh (or even Firefox/ IE users on Mac, for that matter) users. My girlfriend has an iBook, and enjoyed using LaunchCast's free service in the past, but now, of course she can't use it. I set her up with an account on my home server, running Server 2k3, so she could try to listen through RDP, but the quality is pretty bad/ it's choppy. Is there anything easy/ free that I could use to set up an audiostream
  • FM audio is pretty low quality to begin with. The compression that stations use (audio engineering compression, not data) tends to bollocks up the sound compared to what you hear from a CD. So I don't see how web radio is much different. The streams online are the equivalent of FM in most cases with the exception of talk radio where you don't need quality (in either content or audio integrity ;P ). But in answer to your question, I would say look for a tuner that is supported by the ALSA project. As lo
  • I believe that the ATI AIW cards that have FM capability show up as another audio source in Windows, you should hopefully be able to use that as your input into either VLC or Windows Media Encoder to stream. You can use Remote Desktop or VNC to control the software (this is the simple answer from someone who doesn't code). Otherwise why not just run an FM tuner into the line-in jack.

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