Stream music via M3U file in LAN in realtime

Question

What I want to do is to setup a "sort of" radio in my college LAN in which, when I play music in any of the media player installed in my computer, I can share the same to other PCs on LAN via just an M3U file. Also, other PCs should be playing the music on that M3U file, what is being played right now on my "music" server (just like a radio station). I'm looking for a free solution that works on Windows 7 (and if possible, also on Linux)

Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this answer your question, but you can use VLC to stream music or video. Others will just have to enter the address of your server in their client and it will stream whatever you are streaming. Or you can use Winamp + shoutcast to stream.

Answer 2

A good solution is to use mpd, mpd is a music player server that runs on linux/windows that can stream music to several users through HTTP. Client can connect to this http stream using standard players (windows, mac, linux, ...). Also, mpd allows you to remotely control the playback using an mpd client of your choice. The architecture is explained in more details on mpd's wiki

Note that mpd is not limited to output to http, it can handle several different types of outputs

Answer 3

Take a look at icecast, a cross-platform streaming server for internet radio. There are broadcasting plugins available for several media players (e.g. foobar, winamp) and you can listen to the radio with pretty much every media player out there.