Internet Radio Stream Stats

Stream Utilities

The Stats provided with WLSL's Live365 stream provide the kind of "dashboard" that puts stream operation under the control of its Admin, which is our job as station managers.

Such "bells and whistles" come with all kinds of stream servers, both the D.I.Y. type like SHOUTcast and Icecast and the commercial ones including StreamGuys, Live365 and others.

For the past few days here at KDX we've been struggling to increase our skill with Icecast V 2.4.3, which is capable of doing more than we know how to do.

For example, Icecast has always defaulted to using Port 8000 and previous attempts on our part to move it to other ports have failed, until yesterday, when we won the game and got it running on a different port.

Now there are other issues to explore, like the wilderness of stream players out in the world which all respond to slightly different wording of "mountpoints" and "extensions" on the stream URL.

We've been able to learn a few things by looking at the server status windows of other Icecast stations, but it isn't always easy to gain access to most servers, which exist behind hidden stream addresses.

Naturally the "Help" files or "Instructions" provided are important, but the writing is sometimes skimpy or uses unclear language; head scratcher stuff.

The most important thing at the beginning of the day is to figure out what we are trying to learn, otherwise we're flying blind.