Writing a Python Music Streamer

Question

I would like to implement a server in Python that streams music in MP3 format over HTTP. I would like it to broadcast the music such that a client can connect to the stream

Answer 1

You'll want to look into serving m3u or pls files. That should give you a file format that players understand well enough to hit your http server looking for mp3 files.

A minimal m3u file would just be a simple text file with one song url per line. Assuming you've got the following URLs available on your server:

/playlists/
/songs/

You'd serve a playlist from the url:

/playlists/myfirstplaylist

And the contents of the resource would be just:

/songs/1
/songs/mysong.mp3

A player (like Winamp) will be able to open the URL to the m3u file on your HTTP server and will then start streaming the first song on the playlist. All you'll have to do to support this is serve the mp3 file just like you'd serve any other static content.

Depending on how many clients you want to support you may want to look into asynchronous IO using a library like Twisted to support tons of simultaneous streams.