This how-to assumes you’ve already read and followed most of Frozen. As mentioned in the previous article, this how-to is for Ubuntu 9.04. Once you have icecast and liveice working, you may want to use mp3’s as your source instead of live audio from your soundcard.

The relevant bits are in liveice.cfg:

SERVER hostnameofserver
PORT 8000
PASSWORD yourpasswordforicecast
USE_LAME3 /usr/bin/lame
NO_SOUNDCARD
HALF_DUPLEX
SAMPLE_RATE 22050
BITRATE 32000
MONO
ENCODING QUALITY 30
HTTP_LOGIN
MOUNTPOINT live
NAME, GENRE, PUBLIC, URL, and DESCRIPTION are all up to you
PASSWORD your icecast password again
MIXER
PLAYLIST /home/user/someplaylistfile
DECODER_COMMAND /usr/bin/mpg123
UPDATE_DELAY 1
MIX_CONTROL_AUTO

The playlist file is simply plaintext, with one file per line, listed as the full path. Example:

/home/user/music/song1.mp3
/home/user/music/song2.mp3
/home/user/music/song3.mp3

Fire it up as before with:

./liveice -@ 2 -F liveice.cfg

Skip the ‘-@ 2’ switch if you’re having trouble, and increase VERBOSE to 10 in liveice.cfg if necessary.

Here at the college, we used to have a streaming media server running Windows Server 2003 for the purpose of broadcasting our athletic events. At some point, it broke, and it became apparent that it would be necessary to rebuild said media server. Being the fan of Microsoft that I am, I decided to go a different route, and try my hand at running Icecast on Linux. Originally, I intended to use ogg for audio encoding, but given our user-base, I decided to do mp3 instead. I didn’t want the headaches of dealing with plugins, and weird file associations on Windows, and making the user jump through twenty hoops to listen to our games. My initial concerns were with licensing, since mp3 is a proprietary format, and typically looked down upon with scorn by the linux community. So I went to the source. The licensing for mp3 explicity permits using the mp3 format without licensing fees if you are a non-profit, and are making absolutely no money from your use of the mp3 format. If you aren’t sure about that, see http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html.

So now for the fun stuff. Ices2 doesn’t support mp3, so it was off to find an encoder that supported mp3 and would talk to Icecast2. In case you’re not too familiar with Icecast or Ices, you must have 2 parts to stream audio. A front end (Icecast) to serve the comressed audio to clients, and a back end encoder (Ices, darkice, liveice, etc.) to compress the audio from whatever source you are using.

We are running on actual server hardware, which doesn’t have any built-in audio capability. It also only has one available PCI slot, which is used by the RAID card, because it is a 1U rackmount chassis. So we bought a Startech USB Audio Adapter from newegg.com for our input source. We’re using Ubuntu 9.04, although 9.10 is coming out in several days.

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