The Adventures of Dolmere Talamasca

Now that you've read Jaycatt's primer you understand that "Your own PC can be the "server", but you have to have a pretty fast internet connection to keep up with the demand. Most cable and DSL lines won't cut it."

In this case you would be streaming directly to the listeners. Your computer is the "internet radio station" that they will tune in to so to speak. So from your mighty Mac desktop you will provide a stream for every resident that would like to listen in. They will connect, via the internet, directly to your computer. The data rate that you choose to stream at will determine the number of listeners that you can handle through your ISP connection.

As we learned from Jaycatt, we should '[k]eep in mind you may have upwards of 30-60 people attempting to listen in, and that's a lot of data to "upload" to people. The other alternative is to "rent" bandwidth on a remote PC, and people will connect to that.'

As you can see in the above graphic your computer supplies an encoded audio feed (yellow line) to the streaming provider. The internet radio listeners (blue lines) will tune in to the stream as it is made available directly from the streaming provider minimizing the requirement for bandwidth at your broadcast location. The SL residents will listen to your stream as it is "relayed" through the streaming provider. This is one of the reasons that delay occurs as the data that you are sending needs to be sent to the remote server and then relayed again across the internet to each listener tuned in.

Jaycatt's primer talks about contacting Jamie Otis in-world. For more information on stream hosting providers that work with SL musicians see this SLMC forum thread:
http://slmc.myfastforum.org/ftopic377-0-asc-0.php

If you have a massive internet connection and would like to create and provide your very own streaming server I'd suggest the Icecast.org free and open source software.

There was a keyword I used in the above desription on purpose. In stream server talk there is the idea of "relaying" the stream. I used that term because the stream originates on the musician's machine, is sent to a streaming provider's server and that server then sends that stream off to the listener. (As an aside, to complicate things unnecessarily, in streaming server speak a relay would mean that the streaming server that is receiving the musician's audio will ALSO send that audio off to one or more other relay servers. This would be done to allow more listener bandwidth. Listeners would connect to any one of multiple possible servers to receive basically the same stream with a slight time delay.)

The above describes my preference for the term "relaycasting" as relay is already a term associated with the core technology.

Normally, as the stream makes its way from one location to another the feed is simply handed off to the next interested party. However, with "realycasting" the stream is tuned in by another musician. The 2nd musician routes the audio stream through their recording gear and layers their own additions to the stream (red lines in the graphic above.) Then the result is broadcast to their streaming server (yellow lines) where listeners tune in (blue lines.)

With each leg of the trip a layer of audio is added, and a layer of DELAY is added. Each musician in line may hear what came before and may add their own content over top, each musician that came BEFORE will not hear anything added after they submit their stream. This would be my argument against using "jam" in the description of the process :)

Raspury Rearwin had a great footnote to add. If you're relaycasting and you're one of the stream originators, not the final person in the relay chain, then you do not NEED to use a commercial provider. You'll only have one listener. So if your stream is 128k then you'll have one listener that needs to get 128k from your home ISP, etc. As long as you have properly configured your home router and network gear to allow your broadcast machine to receive connections you can originate from a direct connection. As Rasp says "it's not recomended, but it's the cheap option :)"

What Is Relaycasting? | Howto Relaycast (Mac OS X) | Howto Relaycast (Winblows)