What's the best solution for streaming audio from concrete 5?

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Hello, I just downloaded concrete 5 and this is my very 1st experience with cms... So far so good...

I do a radio show and people have asked me to do some podcasts.

While researching on the subject before posting, I found a lot (and not always very clear) informations about the subject but nothing which answered my questions.

So here it is : I want to stream audio from concrete. I have created a special page which will hold the links to my audio file. Now I must try to embed a player and make it so that it does not take a lot of traffic and I do not want people to be able to download the audio files.

any idea on how this can be done? What audio format should I use? Mp3 is just too heavy... FLAC, maybe?

Sorry for the mewb question. Your help is appreciated.

P.

PS I have very little experience with programming... so cryptic answers will not be understood :D

infinityunit
 
mesuva replied on at Permalink Reply
mesuva
Have you looked at something likehttp://soundcloud.com/ ?

It's similar to youtube in that you upload your media to them and they take care of the hosting and bandwidth. It streams your audio so people can't download it.

Once you've uploaded a track to soundcloud, it should be pretty easy to add to your concrete5 site too - you hit the share button on the track (it's the little </> symbol on the player) and copy the 'embed' code. In concrete5 you would simply add an HTML block, pasting in the embed code.

The only minor problem with this is that the players might get in the way of the pop up menus when you are editing the page. A tip with this is to click on the right hand side of the blocks so that the block menu can be clicked on.
infinityunit replied on at Permalink Reply
infinityunit
Hiya,

this would be a great and easy and fast solution. However I have many hours of audio material to stream and soundcloud only allow 2 hours (free) I could get more hours but then I would have to pay... I already rent a 600mo server space... It would make more sense to use that... And also soundcloud's compression is really ugly (I already have a soundcloud account and have tried their services).

I'm sure there must be a media player out there that could make it easy for the visitors of my site to listen to the audio.

Even if it means learning (the hard way) something new in computer programming...

Thanks anyway
mesuva replied on at Permalink Reply
mesuva
Another option might be Grooveshark. Not sure of the limits there, but I've seen it suggested elsewhere on the forums here.. it has similar embedding features -http://widgets.grooveshark.com/...

I know there are a couple of media players in the marketplace here, but you could also look at integratinghttp://jplayer.org/

With the format, I think MP3 is going to be your best approach. For Jplayer, you need to supply as a minimum mp3 or m4a. You can also supply oggs and other formats, but they only get used if the browser supports them.

Putting files on your own site means it's going to be pretty hard to prevent people from downloading them. The casual viewer wouldn't have a clue how to do it though.
infinityunit replied on at Permalink Reply
infinityunit
Thanks again.

I'm currently looking with my Host to see if they can install icecast streaming server on my server... I'll see where this goes :)

Icecast is an open source project from the people who brought us the OGG Vorbis codec...

I'll still have a look at what you suggested though.

Thanks

P.
cali replied on at Permalink Reply
cali
i'm making a soundcloud player widget as Concrete5 satndard bloc to let you share any soundcloud sound on your site. (with all format and options you have for widget in soundcloud)

it will be ready within few days max.