5 Popular Free Online Audio Broadcasting Programs

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz around the live streaming of video, but there usually isn’t any information about broadcasting live audio.  Today, we’re going to tell you about 5 different tools that let you stream live audio online.

Shoutcast DNAS

If you are a medium or advanced level user, you will love Shoutcast DNAS, but you will need ample bandwidth and access to your own server.  There are lots of features for Shoutcast DNAS that include streaming off port 80, all-new SHOUTcast YP2 protocol, real-time metadata and stats reporting, static station IDs, multiple stations from a single server instance, in-stream metadata in standardized XML, UTF-8 and international character encoding and improved server and stream security.

Once you create your station, you will need to register with Shoutcast in order to get a unique authentication key. Moreover, you will get listed on the Shoutcast Radio directory. What’s more exciting is that all of these features are totally free of cost! This software runs well on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

Firefly Media Server

Previously known as mt-daapd, Firefly Media Server is a project that allows you to serve digital music to Roku, Soundbridge and iTunes. This is a server that you can use to broadcast live audio streams on the web. Not only that, when streaming radio on the internet, you can include your iTunes library.

This is an open source project that runs very well in Linux.  Beta versions are available for Windows, but there isn’t a Mac release.

Icecast

Icecast is yet another live audio streaming server that anyone can use for free. This is an open source project; meaning that anyone can modify it or build upon this work. Icecast works on both Windows and Linux.

PeerCast

PeerCast uses P2P (peer-to-peer) technology to minimize the usual cost for streaming audio on the web. PeerCast is a streaming media multicast software that is free and open source. Not only audio streaming, but PeerCast can be used to stream videos live on the internet as well.

VLC

Last and probably the best. VLC (Video Lan Client) is known very well for playing all types of media files.  However, very few know what exactly VLC was created for. It’s actually a server that can be used to broadcast music or videos over the web. Like you already know, when you broadcast audio/video using VLC, you can literally run all types of files.

VLC is compatible with almost all platforms including Windows, Mac OS X and many other Linux distributions including Ubuntu and LinuxMint.