[Web4lib] Streaming MP3s

[Will Owen]

We're considering a project to put about 75 hours of music files up as a 
kind of "internet radio station."  The music comes from a local collection 
of public domain recordings.  The collection manager would like to have a 
continuous stream playing in a loop--you click on a link from our website 
and can listen as long as you like.  His preference would be to have the 
music encoded as MP3.

I'd appreciate any recommendations/caveats for staging this 
service--streaming audio servers, hardware and bandwidth requirements, etc. 
This is a new area for us, and I'm pretty ignorant about best practices and 
choices.  One concern is that the stream doesn't get pirated and repackaged 
without some sort of identification, so the possibility of inserting a 
periodic "station identification" is on the table as well.

Thanks,

Will Owen
Head, Library Systems
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill