Question

I’m recording a mono audio stream using a PIC at 8-bit 8Khz and streaming it raw to another microprocessor that houses a web server. I’m currently buffering the data and turning it into a wav file that gets played in the browser. What I’d like to be able to do is continuously stream the audio as it’s being recorded without putting a lot of encoding overhead on the second processor. I’ve been searching but most searches turn up just streaming from a stored file, but since the file size isn’t known ahead of time I’m not sure how to do this without the overhead of mp3 encoding.

Answer 1

You may find that simply creating a WAV file (or other raw format) that keeps growing will, in most players/browser plugins, cause the file to act as a live stream. This is, I believe, basically how like Ogg streaming and similar works. Because the player begins playing before it is done downloading anyway, it keeps playing and downloading until the end of the file, but the file has no end so it just keeps going.