1. 1
Implementation of Internet Radio
Ankit Bapat, Sainath Komakula
Student, Dept. of Electronics and Telecommunication,
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology,
Wadala, Mumbai.
Dr.Saurabh Mehta,
Professor, Dept. of Electronics and Telecommunication,
Vidyalankar Institute of Technology,
Wadala, Mumbai.
Abstract—Internet Radio is an upcoming sector in India.
It has great potential since it falls in entertainment
industry. The basic object is to build Internet Radio
service for our college. The proposed system consists of
software which will encode the voice from microphone to
MP3 format along with dedicated server which streams
the data to end user on an android application. The
application includes list of other radio stations along with
the detail description of that station. The additional
features like rating in which the user can rate other radio
stations is also provided in android application. This
additional feature can be used as sponsorship for outside
world and even in the college. It is a kind of T.R.P rating
used to judge live programmers. The viewership of the
project can be noted by this mechanism. To store rating
information given by user and to keep the account of user
who is using the application and listening to the stream, a
backend database is used. The future scope of this paper is
to connect all educational institutes in India through their
own Internet radio stations at campus level by using an
android application.
Keywords—Server, Data base, Android application,
MPEG- Moving Picture Experts Group, MP3 (MPEG-1
Audio Layer 3).WAV-Waveform audio File, AAC-
Advanced Audio Coding WMA-Windows Media Audio
I. INTRODUCTION
Radio service is an age old entertainment activity in India
having immense potential for connecting majority of people.
In recent years internet users are increasing at an exponential
rate. Most of the features along with entertainment feature like
live chat, live online radio, live TV are available with the user
at any time. The demand for live online radio also known as
Internet radio is increasing nowadays. This is intended to
provide basic idea of the software components that are
required to develop own Internet radio at an institution level.
The technology behind the Internet Radio is streaming which
is used to distribute audio formats like MP3, WMA, Ogg,
WAV and more. Data in the form of audio is continuously
transmitted over the local area network in UDP packets, those
packets are reassembled at the receiving android application.
The streamed audio is played after 1.5 seconds of delay on
Internet speed of 2 mbps.
Fig.1. Block diagram of Internet Radio[5]
II. BACKGROUND
In India there is a population of 1.2 Billion+ which
includes 650 Million Males and 580 Million Females
among this population there are over 900 Million mobile
phone connections with 200 million internet users and
130 million smartphones [4]. Indian online population
grows steadily and currently 73.8 million users surfs the
web via home or work computer. India is fourth largest
country of internet users after CHINA, US and JAPAN.
Almost half the internet users are of below 25 years of
age which is around 48% of the population, the year on
year increase in media, entertainment and music app is
around 78% [4]. Internet radio application serves the
purpose of streaming live radio to the user through
internet.

2. 2
Fig.2. Statistics of Internet users
The table ‘History of Internet Radio Stations in India’
shows four early established Internet Radio stations in
India .they include Radio Dum Dum which was first
developed in 2005 [2]. Later came other radio stations
such as Radio Maska , Deccan and MyOpus radio
Fig.3. History of Internet Radio Stations in
India[6][7][8][9][10]
A. Radio Dum Dum
Radio Dum Dum was the Indian initial internet radio
started as a song playing station to cater the NRI
community from Kerala. As the response was enormous,
Radio Dum Dum started streaming for other Operating
systems other than window like in Mac and Linux OS.
Radio Dum Dum is world's first Malayalam Internet
radio from Kerala [2]. All kind of Malayalam music and
related programs are the main contents. Radio Dum
Dum is the only Malayalam radio available through
Spodtronics GPRS Spodradio. So we can hear Radio
Dum Dum anywhere in the world even if we are on the
move.
B. Radio Maska
Radio Maska initially used to play only songs without
any presenter, it started live shows with around 15
presenters or rather called Jockey. During March 2009
[2], the station had made some changes in looks of their
website and had an add-on feature in which listeners can
request and dedicated any song. Radio Maska has
customized Screamer Radio to be Radio Maska Desktop
Player which can downloaded from the website and
install in PC for smooth streaming. The stream can be
played in tuneIn radio which is available for Blackberry
windows IPhone, android Phones. The stream can also
be played in Windows media player, ITunes, Winamp
and in Real player.
C. Deccan Radio
Deccan Radio began operation on 6 July 2008 [2]. Using
SHOUTcast technology, Deccan Radio has been
broadcasting interactive programs and has gained
appreciation of its listeners very quickly.
D. MyOpusRadio
MyOpusRadio has the unique feature of providing
customized music players and radio channels for music
and event related websites. Confluence Radio, made for
the Ladakh Confluence 2009 and 2010, Pubrock Radio,
for the Pubrock Fest 2009, Metro Monkey Radio,
Headbangers India Radio are some of the players that
MyOpusRadio has provided. Live webcast is another
feature provided by MyOpusRadio Events like
KroaKING, Nasty Peach live, and the Zero Reunion
Tour have been streamed live from their venues. It is
also available for streaming on mobile phones as well.

3. 3
III. SERVER
Icecast is a streaming media project released as free
software maintained by Xiph.org Foundation[1]. It also
refers specifically to the server program. Icecast was
created by Jack Moffatt and Barath Raghavan to provide
open source audio streaming server that anyone can
modify and use. This server developed through C
language. This Icecast support for Linux and Windows
platform. Current version of Icecast is much improved
than the previous one. It has start and stop button where
start button enables the server to stream the content and
stop to disable the streaming. Server status bar indicates
the current process of server.
Fig.3 Statistical data of Icecast server
Fig.4. Comparison of Servers
IV. SOURCE
In our Internet radio we implemented source by using
SAM broadcaster. SAM is short for Streaming Audio
Manager and was developed specifically with the needs
of Internet broadcasting in mind. It combines many
years of research with cutting-edge technology to
provide the user the power, features, and reliability for
professional broadcasting. SAM takes control of all
aspects of your broadcast and makes the user sound
professional while saving the user’s time and money.
SAM Broadcaster has streaming configuration settings
in which we can set IP address, port address, password
and mount point. There also some additional details we
can configure such as Station name, Station description,
Genre. There is server type selection block where we can
connect to desired server. Here we connect Icecast server
because it is best compatible with SAM Broadcaster, in
Icecast we choose version 2 for streaming the media content
over the internet.
Fig.4. Server details
Fig.5. SAM Broadcaster

4. 4
There are two decks in SAM broadcaster which is
necessary for continuous playing the content on server
machine. It has other features like MIC input where
actually Radio Jockey can sit and talk, which is going to
be simplex communication between server and client
connection. There is another window called playlist
where we can make directory of music files or recorded
audio so that continuous content can be streamed
through server to the end android application.
The encoder in SAM Broadcaster as capable of provide
various bit rates like 32kbps, 48kbps, 64kbps and
128kbps. We can stream as mono channel and stereo
channel, we have to set up encoder of SAM Broadcaster
for the ipv4 address of the server machine for the
streaming to begin. The fig5 ‘SAM broadcaster’ shows
that the data is streaming on internet in the encoders
section. The figure 6 ‘Encoder of SAM Broadcaster’
shows encoder of SAM Broadcaster. In our web radio
we selected 128kbps sampling rate for auto and stereo
mode.
Fig: 6. Encoder of SAM Broadcaster
V. CLIENT
Client is end module of Internet Radio architecture. It may be
an in-built web media player, desktop application or else
mobile application. In our case we are using mobile
application as our receiving client. It has login activity where
users have to authenticate themselves before using Internet
Radio service. We choose Parse for login and authentication
of the user, another page of the mobile application is a list of
radio station which are online available presently all India and
outside and along with this lists we have included one more
radio station from our own server. Each radio station will have
rating bar where listeners will rate a particular station.
Fig.7. Login Page and Home page
There is a dynamic graph which shows number of users
connected to particular station, a separate data store value is
defined for this type of activity.
Fig.8. List of radio Stations and Description
VI. DATABASE
The backend database to store the user’s information like
username, password and email address is done by using Parse
cloud storage database. It also stores the rating information
giving by the user to a particular station, it has 3 sections to
store the rating information of each of the three radio stations.
Another section called ‘users’ is used to store user’s username
password and email address. This database is secured as it
asks for admin password and username before it can be
accessed as only the admin can modify any row or column in
the database. The only limit of this database is that it can store
up to 100 users. The figure 10 ‘Parse Database’ shows the
entire structure of this database.

5. 5
Fig.9. Parse Database
VII. GRAPH
The graph shown in figure 11 is the output that can be seen in
the parse database of all the radio station, this figure shows the
number of users along with the duration for which they were
listening to Country radio. On right side there are sections for
Hindi and Rap radio which stores the similar information
stored in country radio section like users listing duration for
the radio station
Fig.10. Graph
VIII. RATING
The figure 11 ‘Rating for country music’ shows five
stars which are used to rate that particular radio station
which in this case is ‘Country Music’ .When the user
clicks on those rating stars the floating point number
gets stored in the backend database inside a particular
section as shown in figure 10 ‘Parse Database’, which in
this case is ‘CountryRating’ that stores the rating
information of ‘Country Music’ radio stations. The
‘CountryRating’ section also stores the unique id of the
user who has rated the radio station. In this way the
ratings given by the user gets stored along with its ID for
future reference. The use of this additional feature is that
the students can judge a live programme. It will serve as
a sponsorship programme for outside world and our own
college. It will be a kind of T.R.P rating system. By the
help of this feature viewership of project can be easily
known.
Fig.11.Description of radio station
IX. RESULT
The output from Icecast can be heard in mozialla firefox as a
continuos audio stream and a delay of 1.5 seconds is observed
after actually playing the song in Sam Broadcaster. To listen
streaming audio from icecast server, the URL should be IP
address of PC that is running icecast server and the port
address of server, which becomes ‘localhost:port/live’ where
mount is mount address of server. The output that can be
heard on the end mobile takes a delay of 2 seconds on the
internet speed of 2 mbps.
Fig.12. Result
X. CALCULATION
By using Icecast server the streaming of 128 kbps done
within a same LAN of a speed of 2 mbps consumes 0.05
GB of bandwidth when one user is connected for 1 hour.
On a larger scale for same content streamed at same
internet speed for 24 hours with 500 users connected at a
time the bandwidth consumed becomes 660 GB [3].

6. 6
Formula:-
Let, Concurrent listeners connected be L1
Bit rate be B1
Frequency be F1
Period for listening the streaming be P1
Bandwidth required be x
Live Streaming Media Bandwidth Requirement,
x= L1*B1*P1*H1 ... (1)
Where, unit for bit rate is in bps (bytes per second)
and unit for period is in seconds
XI. IMPLEMENTATION IN COLLEGE
In Vidyalankar Institute of Technology the LAN speed
of 100 mbps near a node is supported which increases
with the distance. The access point is of 128 mbps
802.11n. The server configurations are as following:-
IBM system 3650m4
32 GB RAM-1600 MHz
300*2 GB HDD-10k
Xeon 16 core processor
2.6 GHz/1866 MHz
Storage 3 TB
A virtual machine of-
4 GB RAM, Quad-core-1 processor, 2GB space
will be allocated to this streaming programme. The test
run will be divided into levels in which concurrent users
will be increased on each level the corresponding
practical value of bandwidth required will be calculated
and accordingly system requirements would be updated
to support higher bandwidth.
Fig 13 calculated theoretical value of bandwidth
required
XII. CONCLUSION
The paper shows that streaming is the best way of real
communication with the majority of people. In India
there are few colleges which have started FM radios but
Internet radio at campus level is yet to come. This paper
provides information about the basic ingredients needed
to implement it on campus level along with calculation
of bandwidth required to actually implement it. If it gets
implemented at campus level many things will get easier
such as, notices can be announced in real-time rather
than putting content on college web site. In future we
can add feature of video streaming so that students will
see the missed out content in the college. With the
advertisements it can be made commercial so that the
money raised will be used for further development of
Internet radio station.
References
[1] Ice cast server documentation
http://icecast.org/docs/icecast-2.3.0/introduction.html
[2] Deccan Radio a model Community Radio Station
(Deccan Radio a model Community Radio Station)
www.siasat.com/english/news/deccan-radio-model-
community-radiostation
[3] Calculation of Bandwidth
www.internet-
radio.com/servers/tools/bandwidth
[4] Mobile And Internet In India 2014: 349 Million
Unique Mobile Phone Users [INFOGRAPHIC](Daze
info)
https://www.dazeinfo.com/2014/07/11/mobile-internet-
india-2014-349-million- unique-mobile-phone-users-70-
traffic-mobile-india-shining-infographic
[5] (Darwin) Streaming Server Administrator Guide
https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA579/e
n_US/QuickTimeStreamingSrvrAdminGuide.pdf
[6] Radio Dum Dum
http://radio-dum-dum.software.informer.com/
[7] India on Internet
http://www.timescrest.com/culture/indie-on-the-internet-
5859

7. 7
[8] Radio Maska terms
http://www.radiomaska.fm/maskatermandcondition.aspx
[9] Deccan Radio 24/7
http://www.deccanradio.com/community/ucp.php?mode
=privacy
[10] Rise of internet radio
http://www.mxmindia.com/2012/04/rise-of-internet-
radio-what-do-traditional-fm-players-think/