I am such a dork
…And I know we’ve talked about Apple a lot lately, but god-damn if I just didn’t fall in love with whoever put together Darwin Streaming Server. Jesus christ on a stick.
After puttering around with Shoutcast, Icecast and some streaming servers written in PHP for a client, I came across the mother of free streaming server technologies: DSS4.
First off, this is totally dorky tech-talk but you don’t have to be a dork to understand the implications of what I’m trying to do, which is put together an internet radio station for Milehighhouse. Pretty cool, and totally useful. Anyway, it’s not a secret that I develop on MacOS X, and so I try to get anything I’m going to use live working first on my development machine. Duh. So I download the official MacOS X port of Shoutcast. And there is one. I install it, get the server running…. and look online to see what else I need.. and you need WinAMP. A MacOS X version of which there is not. Cool. So they ported the server but not the required client to get the stream working.
Then comes Icecast, which is actually worse… Their versions wouldn’t even compile on Darwin and required libraries I couldn’t even find.
Then comes the almighty Darwin Streaming Server. Which (due to my download of QuicktimeSS requiring OSX Server) I installed on Linux. What did I have to do? Type “./Install”. That’s it. The rest was web-adminstered, with a web interface to fucking die for. My client will be able to drag and drop from a list of files on the server to a playlist pane, click save, click play and voila. Another MP3 stream. Why has this technology not gotten more press? Apple simply blows anything out of the water in this arena, and it’s running on a platform other than theirs, to boot.