On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 11:28:33 -0800, "Joel Koltner"
wrote:
"Jim Thompson" wrote in
message ...
Does there exist an apparatus that I could connect the audio output of
my FM tuner, assign an IP address, and distribute throughout my PC
network?
You're looking for a standalone box rather than something that uses a PC with
sound card, right?
If so, I haven't seen anything really suitable -- I'm looking for the same
thing. I've even toyed with the idea of building one, but realistically you'd
want it to be compatible with, e.g., your Roku Soundbridge there (and I'd want
it to work with my Logitech Squeezebox stuff), and to do that you need an MP3
(or similar) *encoder* in the box. Now, that's easy to do with a PC (there's
a very good, freely-available MP3 encoder called LAME available), but with a
little standalone "network accessible brick," typically their processors
(often low-end ARMs) don't have the floating-point unit that LAME wants...
and -- interestingly enough -- there are very few freely-available fixed-point
MP3 encoders out there, and the ones that do exist (e.g., one called SHINE)
are rather poor compared to LAME.
There are commercially-available fixed-point MP3 encoders, but apparently no
one seems to think the market is big enough to support this more traditional
approach.
At least that's my analysis of why standalone "feed in analog audio here, spit
out MP3/Shoutcast-encoded audio over Ethernet there" boxes don't seem to
exist.
I'd love to find out I'm wrong about that, though.
Same here. You'd think that would be a desirable product. But I
guess markets are driven by the iPhone crowd... they can't even walk
down the street without being glued to the Web :-(
Someone will likely point out that you can pick up netbooks for all of ~$200
or so at times, and that would work just ducky to run LAME and perform this
function -- although you still have to install and configure all the software
yourself.
---Joel
...Jim Thompson
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