How online radio live stream music and are there available resources to build one with Node.js?

Question

i'm little curious about 'How live streaming web application works'. Recently I want to built something like a online radio that can perform live stream through all the client, like music, speech etc. I'm quite familiar with Java Spring MVC and Node.js . If there are some resource using thease above technology, it would be really helpful for me to see how it works. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

There are two good articles about it:

• Streaming Audio on the Web with NodeJS
• Using NodeJS to Stream a Radio Broadcast

You may also find this module helpful:

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/websockets-streaming-audio

Answer 2

The best way to do this is use Node.js as your source application, and leave the actual serving of streams to existing servers. No reason to re-invent streaming on the web if you can get all the flexibility you need by writing the source end.

The flow will look like this:

Your Radio Source App --> Icecast (or similar) --> Listeners

Inside your app itself:

Raw audio sources --> Codecs (MP3, AAC w/ADTS, etc.) --> Icecast Source Client

Basically, you'll need to create a raw PCM audio stream using whatever method you want for your use case. From there, you'll send that stream off to a handful of codecs, configured with different bitrates. What bitrate and quality you use is up to you, based on the bandwidth availability of your users and tradeoff with quality you prefer. These days, I usually have 64k streams for bad mobile connections, and 256k streams for good connections. As long as you have at least a 128k stream in there, you'll be putting out acceptable quality.

The Icecast source client can be a simple HTTP PUT these days. The old method is very similar... instead of PUT, the verb was SOURCE. (There are some other minor differences as well, but that's the gist.)