Internet radio - what do I need?

[skipshady]

Say I want to do an internet radio show (think BigSoccer radio with less snobbery). What kind of hardware and software would I need? It would most likely be a combination of spoken word and music, a 2 hour show 3, 4 times a week.

Thanks for your help.

[patrickdavila]

Say I want to do an internet radio show (think BigSoccer radio with less snobbery). What kind of hardware and software would I need? It would most likely be a combination of spoken word and music, a 2 hour show 3, 4 times a week.

Thanks for your help.

How technical are you? My friends do a weekly live linux/tech show every Wednesday at 9:00 PM E.S.T:
http://thelinuxlink.net/tllts/

They run the whole show for almost nothing. They use dynebolic (bootable linux multimedia distribution) on fairly old hardware to stream the show:
http://www.dynebolic.org/

At the very least you'll need a mic and maybe a mixer if you have live guests with you. Having guests calling in is a little more complex. You either need a phone hybrid (can be very experensive) or a second computer running an internet phone application such as skype and mixing in the phone feed:
http://www.skype.com/

The guys from the linuxlink tech show had one of our LUG members bulid a phone hybrid. He was an electronics whiz who just got out of the navy. Obviously this is not feasible for most people.

Other than that the biggest cost is bandwidth. The more listeners the more bandwidth you'll need. If you don't want to stream the show live you could record the show, edit it and make it available for download. Audacity is a great application for audio editing:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

[skipshady]

Thanks for the response. It's still in very early planning stages and I'm trying to figure out the requirements and limitations. I was hoping this could all be done on a Mac OS X environment, but we'll manage with Linux.

[phats_away]

there's a plugin for winamp that my friends were using a few years ago that should be free. i'm sure there are a lot of solutions, check download.com