Learning Network Programming with Java

UDP streaming

Using UDP to stream audio or videos is common. It is efficient and any loss of packets or out-of-order packets will cause minimal problems. We will illustrate this technique by steaming live audio. A UDP server will capture the microphone's sound and send it to a client. The UDP client will receive the audio and play it on the system's speakers.

The idea of a UDP streaming server is to break up the stream into a series of packets that are sent to a UDP client. The client will then receive these packets and use them to reconstitute a stream.

In order to illustrate streaming audio, we need to know a bit about how Java handles audio streams. Audio is handled by a series of classes that are found in the javax.sound.sampled package. The ...