How to create a streaming audio site with Linux or FreeBSD

Are you bored at work and wish you could listen to the hundreds or thousands of mp3's or ogg's that you have ripped to your hard drive at home? Maybe you want to create an internet radio station and live out your fantasy of being a DJ. Whatever your reason, I'm going to show you how to very easily and freely create a kick ass streaming audio site using Linux or *BSD that you can listen to from any computer. I say again, any system - Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever - will be able to listen. Sound cool? (no pun intended)

This article is going to assume an intermediate level of l33t computer hacking skillz. If you don't even know what "l33t" is or if your idea of computer skills means fooling around in the Windows control panel, you might be lost here. I'll try to keep this as simple as I can, but we're going to be dealing with networking, webservers, HTML and shell scripting. Of course you might be smart as hell and can pick this stuff up easily. Read on.