Audio streaming LAN questions (setting up server&clients for non-profit organization)

hi:

we are setting up 13 workstations (computers) to play audio from an audio server in a cultural music/dance school, a non-profit organization in kuala lumpur, malaysia. the 13 workstations will all be used at the same time, meaning the server is going to be really busy.

the entire system of server and computers will run on Linux. all 13 clients will run ubuntu 7.10. server will also be ubuntu.

questions:
1. the music quality has to be relatively good and will be played over speakers to an audience of student dancers. do we use AAC or MP3, and what would be the encoding bitrates.

2. we plan to use Songbird for audio for now. is this the right choice and is there anything else? should we be considering LinuxMCE? we need to keep the user interface really simple because the teachers are not computer savvy.

3. since i'm not sure what will be the bandwidth required, is it sufficient to use 100Mbps network, or should we run a gigabit network?

4. video may also be streamed to the dancers to show the movements, patterns, etc. What specifications should we use(video encoding formats, etc.)?

5. can anyone show me the calculations for the bandwidth, making your own reasonable assumptions?

all help is greatly appreciated.

thanks, ram.

I can't help you with Unices.

As for audio stream broadcasting you may use freeware streaming server Icecast. I don't think you will have any problem finding streaming players for it.

Icecast supports AAC. I would use 192 kbps AAC or MP3 with higher bit-rates. However I don't know anything about your music, so you may just test several bit-rates.

If I'm not mistaken 100Mbps LAN can be used to broadcast HD video. But it really depends on how your network is built. 1000Mbps network cards are not expensive so they are highly recommended.

To calculate bandwidth you can multiply bit-rate by time in seconds. 'coz you have multiple clients, you should multiply the given amount by number of clients.

If you need to broadcast video, you may use freeware VideoLan. It can broadcast even DVD videos.

You should probably use MPEG-4 codec 'coz must be needing high quality videos. However you should know that this codec wasn't build with stream broadcasting in mind.

Originally Posted by Stream Recorder

As for audio stream broadcasting you may use freeware streaming server Icecast. I don't think you will have any problem finding streaming players for it.

Does Icecast push audio to the network which clients just tap onto, or can a client pick any song from a list and play it, pause, stop, rewind as users see fit?

Sorry, my knowledge is still fledgling: What's the difference between using Icecast and using an audio player from the client to play music stored as files on a server?

Thank you for your help.

Originally Posted by ramsamba

Does Icecast push audio to the network which clients just tap onto, or can a client pick any song from a list and play it, pause, stop, rewind as users see fit?

I've seen Icecast used for live radio stations. You can learn more at Icecast.org

Originally Posted by ramsamba

Sorry, my knowledge is still fledgling: What's the difference between using Icecast and using an audio player from the client to play music stored as files on a server?

General streaming media FAQ

You have LAN so downloading files before listen to/viewing them might be OK.