How to Stream Audio From Your Web Site

This should be no secret to a web-savvy music marketer like you, but I'll state the obvious anyway: You must give music fans a way to hear your music on the Web. And to really prove that you're a smart cookie, you should give people the option of streaming your audio clips or downloading them.



One of the easiest ways to do this is to send people to your page at CD Baby or GarageBand or some other music site, since these services usually automate the process for you. However, I just discovered a fairly simple way to set up both options from my own web site.



(Note: The streaming option works when using Internet Explorer, but for some reason it doesn't work with Firefox, which is growing in popularity. For now, though, most people still use IE.)



Okay, here's what I did. Follow these steps with your own audio files:



1. Using the free MusicMatch Jukebox, I took a spoken word segment from my Artist Empowerment Radio show and converted it to a 32kpbs MP3 file. I reduced it to that rate to make it easy for people with dial-up connections to stream it. I named the file make.mp3



2. I opened a new blank Notepad file (any simple text editor will do) and entered the complete URL of the MP3 file on my server, which is



http://www.bob-baker.com/musicpromotionblog/make.mp3



I saved this file with the name make.m3u



3. Then within the HTML of this page that you're reading, I used this code:



<a href="make.m3u" type="audio/mpeg">Stream It</a>



Note that it links to the simple .m3u text file I just created and includes a message to let the browser know that this link references an audio file.



I also added the following code that links directly to the MP3 file -- for people who want to download this file to their hard drives:



<a href="/make.mp3">Download It</a>



4. Then, using my FTP client, I uploaded the make.m3u file using ACSII and the make.mp3 using the Binary setting. Both files were placed in the same folder on my server as this page.



And that's it. Ready to try it out? Click the links below:



Stream It or Download It



Note: You might want to make a separate 128kpbs MP3 version for the downloadable file. The 32kpbs version is easier to stream, but the sound quality is considerably less.



Here are some other resources that cover delivering streaming audio on the Web:

• http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/streaming.htm
• http://www.deliveryourmedia.com/article-audio-primer-5.html
• http://nunzioweb.com/streaming_audio-example.htm

If you have any tech tips on how to make this work better, please post a response here or send an e-mail to Bob AT TheBuzzFactor.com -- be sure to replace AT with @.



Also, soon I plan to try an inexpensive software program called MP3 Sound Stream, which uses Flash-based streaming files. Many people rave about it. I'll keep you posted.