Streaming an audio file vs serving it statically

Question

I have a website where users can upload audio files (of type aac). The users can playback their audio files through a web browser or mobile devices such as a iPhone or an Android. For web browsers, I would like to support the latest HTML5 audio tag and have a flash fallback for older browsers.

I did some research and mp3 looks like the best format for serving audio files to a web browser because some modern browsers support mp3's natively and for browsers that don't (FireFox) can fallback to flash. Once the user uploads an aac file I will create another version of the audio file as an mp3 that can be used to serve.

What is the best way to serve these audio files? Streaming or statically serving? Are there any advantages or disadvantages? Perhaps there is a flexible server technology. I know about icecast but I don't think it fit my specific use case.

Also I have a relational db which stores a link to each static audio file. I would like to use HTTP streaming and not a propriety protocol as well. Most importantly I would like to do this as efficiently as possible since bandwidth may get expensive.

Answer 1

Think that the streaming protocols supported by iDevices (iPhone, iPad, iPod) and Android phones, are not the sames. While iDevices support HTTP Streaming, Android phones only support RTSP protocol.

So, if you want to serve multiple devices with a streaming protocol, think you will have to use encoders/servers for each type (segmenter and a webserver for iDevices, RTSP server for Android).

In terms of efficience I don't think you will improve a lot, but using HTTP streaming you get others benefits like the possibility to use multibitrate files, that allow you to serve different encoded versions of the same audio to serve different audio qualities depending on the user<->server connection speed.

Implement HTTP Streaming is very cheap. In fact, you can use ffmpeg to encode the files and the free segmenter provided for Apple to do it. But, remember that won't work for Android devices.