A couple of months in the fall I have boo coos of musicians roaming around my place. I want to broadcast live over the Internet some of their music.

I find plenty of information on taking the stream from my computer up to the satellite and to iceshout to go out over the Internet.

What I don't find is what kind of hardware I need. Can I buy a couple of microphones and plug them into the mic plug on sound card and it work? Do I need mixers?????? Will a mic on a web cam work. What quality do I need.

Has anyone had experience is this area?
Has anyone seen any information relating to this in their Internet searches.
Has anyone suggestions.

Thanks
Dave

I think you should buy some microphones for the singer and drummer and a mixing desc where you can plug in the microphones, guitars and keyboard. Then you connect the line out of the mixing desc to the line in of your soundcard. Make sure your software uses line-in as input in stead of mic-in and you should be fine.

I have a behringer Eurorack MXB1002 mixer, I think it costed 160€ but it has 5 microphone preamps build in, it's not top quality but for a live stream it should be fine. I've used it for recording small bands and playing live.

Using the microphone on your webcam doesn't seem a good idea to me.

Thanks for the reply. You are the first person who actually said they do this type of thing.

What brand and type of microphones are you using.

I'm using some cheap (25€) dynamic behringer microphones with cheap preamps, they sound absolutely horrible for singers but go nice for micing distorted guitar amps. For the singer I use a good AKG.Emotion series microphone C900 with a decent preamp with some singer-specific options in it. It's a condenser microphone and it sounds absolutely brilliant (it should because I paid over 300€ for the combination).

Actually if you want to stream you can manage it with two decent condenser microphones, you need two preamps with phantom power for them and don't need a mixing desc. The drawback being that you won't be able to adjust anything.

The best method is, according to me , putting a microphone for every instrument and singer. If the guitar amps have line-outs you can use that and save on micropones. Then you let everybody adjust their volume so the band likes what they hear, after that you adjust the faders on your mixing desc and listen to the headphones and make sure that sounds good because that is what people will here when you are streaming it on the net.

If you want to be sure you can record a piece first and then play it back, if that sounds good it's OK and you can start streaming.

If you want it to sound good you need good equipment and that costs money, but when I started I had almost no equipment at all and I managed allright, you might find some friends with a microphone or a mixing desc lying around, so use those before you start buying stuff.

Excellent information. Thank you very much, its what I need to know.

Now I need to start looking for stuff to borrow. My son-in-law is a good place to start.

This will be for a renaissance re-enactment group. So there can be no instruments that are not period to the 12th thru 15th centries.

Just for information purposes to you and anyone else reading this thread I will post my progress. That may not be until October unless I have questions I need to pass by you.

Again thanks.
Dave