The ability to stream audio is useful for music groups or singers who want to develop their own website to sell their music over the Internet or try to be discovered by a recording label. Of course you can set up your own streaming audio website with your favorite music even if you are not a musician.

Equipment and Software for Streaming

Specifically you will also need quality recording computer equipment and software:

• A minimum of 275 MB free space on your hard drive
• Original recording of songs (CD, Tape, Live)
• Cable to connect CD/Tape/Microphone to computers computer sound card
• Server space with large bandwidth
• Encoding software, such as:
• Cool Edit 96 Software or
• Cool Edit Pro Software or
• Goldwave Software or
• Any other equally good software

If you skimp on any of these three items you will have poor quality music products and few will want to listen. This is the most expensive investment you will make in having the ability do your own streaming audio.

5 Steps to Streaming Your Audio
There are 5 basic steps for streaming audio on the Internet. These are:

Step 1: Record your music onto your computer from the music source through the computer’s sound card and record to an audio file. You need to be in a room free of extraneous sound, the quieter the better. The dog barking, cell phone ringing, or airplane flying low overhead will be recorded as noise in the music file.

Step 2: Using encoding software, convert the music audio file to a WAV file. This is a standard file for music sharing.

Step 3: Eliminate the noise that is embedded in your WAV file from the computers sound card. If you invested in one of the three recommended encoding software programs listed above you are lucky, because these programs automatically eliminate extraneous noise. If you did not, then you will need a program that presents the WAV file in video form for you to manually remove the noise. Recommend the easier version.

Step 4: Compress the WAV file into a MP3 file using the encoding software.

Step 5: Upload MP3 file to you website and make it available for others to listen or download.

Although these steps appear to be simplistic, you do need some technical knowledge. However, like everything else practice makes perfect. After you work the kinks out of the system, you will be developing your own new Napster or Yahoo Google Player streaming audio service.