What kind of server is used by sites like Pandora or Last.fm to serve media files?

Question

What kind of server is used by sites like Pandora or Last.fm to serve media files?

I am assuming they would have something other than webserver for storing and serving media files... what are some of the scalable solutions..

Answer 1

The most obvious is VideoLan. Cross platform, and free (not just a video player, there's a server here too!): http://www.videolan.org/

Although I've never looked at firefly, but it looks like it may well be a cross platform solution: http://www.fireflymediaserver.org/

while umedia's software is aimed more at the video market, I'm sure it can do MP3 streaming too: http://www.umediaserver.net/

There's a whole list of available alternatives that I hope will satisfy your needs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_streaming_media_systems

have fun!

Answer 2

No clue what those specific sites use but the two standard solutions have been a streaming server such as Flash Media Server which uses RTMP or a psuedo-streaming server which uses HTTP with LightTPD or Apache. A streaming server allows you to securely serve media files without local cache. It also allows built in seeking. Pseudo-streaming allows clients to locally cache files which provides a longer term buffer. You have to build in the seeking yourself.

Answer 3

Pandora uses Apache:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:51:22 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Length: 1750551
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, max-age=-1
Pragma: no-cache, no-store
Expires: -1
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/octet-stream