Best practices for audio streaming

Question

What are the best practices for reasonably-performant audio streaming user uploaded content on a website?

I understand just putting MP3 in a SQL-like database is a bad idea. There are ways to just upload those files to a directory but that might not be best for streaming content.

Would something like Redis which acts as an in-memory key value store be adequate to reasonably quickly serve streaming music?

Any pointers to additional reading would be helpful, thanks!

Sorry, new to this sort of thing! It's an in memory key value store, so theoretically couldn't it host an MP3 and serve it to users on request? — joeyfb, May 07 '19 at 19:58
No, because it isn't a web server. You still need one of those. — Michael Hampton, May 07 '19 at 21:15

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 07 '19 at 21:29

2

Just because you can stuff a few MB into an object in a in-memory datastore, doesn't mean it is a good idea. Persistence, the size of the media library relative to your RAM, scalability to many clients, and random access for seeking are all issues.

Research open source CDNs and broadcasting software and study how they do it.

answered May 07 '19 at 21:29

John Mahowald

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Thanks for the reply to what I'm sure seemed a silly question. Never thought much about media streaming before so just knowing a few terms gives me a good place to start – joeyfb May 07 '19 at 21:36

Best practices for audio streaming

1 Answers1