Sander van Zoest, formerly of MP3.com, gave a great introduction to serving audio via Apache and other servers.
van Zoest described several different ways to deliver audio: HTTP downloading, HTTP streaming, Real Time Streaming Protocol (both on-demand streaming and live broadcast) and Windows Media Player’s MMS protocol. Since audio players seem to have pretty dumb HTTP implementations, it’s important to get things like MIME types exactly right.
He listed off a bunch of common audio formats and how to configure their extensions and MIME types correctly (pointing out that the correct MIME type for .mp3 files is audio/mpeg, but most websites get this wrong). He also spent a bit of time on the audio meta-formats such as M3U, SDP, ASX, and SMIL, which describe playlists. These formats are the bridge between your Apache server and your audio player. They are described in more detail in Sander’s online notes.
Next, we looked at configuring Apache to serve large audio files. In short, you usually need to set your MaxClients and TimeOut directives to large values. Also, at the operating system level, you probably need to increase the size of your TCP listen queues to avoid clients seeing “connection refused” messages.
We also examined the Shoutcast and Icecast protocols for streaming audio.
A couple of questions from the audience asked if anyone was writing Apache 2.0 Protocol modules for RTSP and RTP, or whether the RealNetworks new Helix initiative was working with the ASF. van Zoest answered that it seemed like there could be some real synergy there (using the same Apache server and configuration files to serve both HTTP and non-HTTP streaming audio) but that there hadn’t been much interaction between the two groups so far. He also mentioned licensing incompatibilities as a potential barrier to integration.