How To: Create a Custom Internet Radio Station

Posted 05/27/2008 at 4:03pm | by Will Smith

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Your IT department won’t let you copy MP3s onto your work PC, and your iPod won’t hold your massive music collection, but you need to listen to tunes while you toil away at the day’s labor. What’s an audiophile to do? The answer is simple: Stream the collection you have stored on your rig at home to your PC at work.

Sure, you could fire up a streaming service such as Pandora, Last.fm, or any one of the thousands of radio stations that simulcast their programming on the Internet, but then you’d have to either listen to a fairly random playlist based on your typical listening habits or to someone else’s playlist instead of your own. It can be fun to hear new tracks and find new artists, until you get stuck with a band you just hate—like Linkin Park. Sometimes you just want to fire up a favorite album and listen to the whole thing from start to finish. That’s where your own personal streaming station comes into play.

It’s easy to build a private streaming radio station that you can connect to from anywhere on the net using free software and services. We wouldn’t suggest deleting your Pandora account and just jamming to your private station, but personalized web radio is a great alternative for days when other streaming services just don’t cut it.

Time = 42 Min

What you Need

• Two PCs
• SqueezeCenter software
  Free, www.slimdevices.com
• A DynDNS Account
  Free, www.dyndns.com
• DynDNS Updater
  Free, www.dyndns.com
• Awesome Music

1. Install SqueezeCenter

The secret sauce in our streaming scheme is SqueezeCenter, the open-source software that powers the Squeezebox. Formerly known as SlimServer, SqueezeCenter extends beyond the basic chores you’d expect from streaming-box software. For starters, it works with more than just the Squeezebox—you can stream your music to any PC with a copy of WinAmp, iTunes, or Windows Media Player installed. The application serves as an impressive web-based music jukebox that you can use to navigate your library and play virtually any DRM-free music format ever created.

The first order of business is to select the rig to install SqueezeCenter on. Remember that it will need to run 24/7, so you probably don’t want to use your monster gaming rig for a server—unless you enjoy paying $300 a month for electricity. We recommend an older laptop or another rig that sips power.

Once that’s decided, download and install SqueezeCenter. The installer will prompt you for the location of your music files and playlists, and then it will scan your library for supported music files, including MP3, FLAC, M4A, OGG, and WMA files. The scanning process can take a long time, especially if you have a massive collection, so now would be a great time to step away from the PC and go for a walk.

Quick Tip: SqueezeCenter will look for album art in both folder.jpg files and inside the ID3 tags themselves. You can easily update your music’s album art using iTunes’s Get Album Art feature or the excellent Album Art Downloader utility (http://sourceforge.net/projects/album-art).

2. Configure SqueezeCenter

Before you can stream, you need to configure SqueezeCenter to accept connections from other PCs. The software allows password-free access to the web interface by default, but only from the computer it’s installed on. We have to change that.
Open your web browser and connect to http://127.0.0.1:9000. Then click the Settings button in the lower-right corner of the interface and select the Advanced tab. Pull down the menu and select the Security tab. You’ll want to enable password protection and set up a username and password for access.

Next, you need to configure the allowed IP addresses. It’s a good idea to give the PCs on your home network access to the SqueezeCenter interface so you can change playlists remotely. To determine the IP addresses that get access to SqueezeCenter, you need to find out what IP range your home network uses. The easiest way to find your IP on XP or Vista is to open a command line (Start > Run > cmd.exe) and type ipconfig. You should see a list of your active network connections, but most home users will see one IP address. To enable access to other computers, you need to tell SqueezeCenter which IP addresses are safe by using a wildcard. Take your IP address and replace the numbers following the final period with an * and put that number into SqueezeCenter’s Allowed IP Addresses field. Then click Apply.

Next: Configure Your Router