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       Sys Admin magazine Web-Exclusive June 12, 2003           
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Web-Exclusive Article:

Streaming Audio the Icecast Way 
by Kerry J. Cox 

About three years ago, I was assigned the task of creating an 
Internet audio streaming solution for my employers at a major 
radio and television station. They had listeners scattered throughout 
the world who wanted to log on and listen to regional college sports 
and local events. The requirements included unlimited and scalable 
connections, and users could listen using most default audio 
applications 
on any platform. The radio station had exhausted the default 60 Real 
Audio 
connections that came with older Red Hat Linux distributions. I quickly 
discovered that the Icecast project provided a viable solution to our 
streaming needs. Based on my experiences since then, I still find the 
icecast program to be a superb product of the open source community. 

The icecast program itself, however, offers only part of the solution; 
the server that starts the stream. For listeners to connect, a valid 
streamer must also be running. Depending on the version of icecast you 
use, there are a variety of streamers from which to choose. 
Applications 
such as LiveIce and MuSE work well with older icecast versions. DarkIce 
is 
another burgeoning live audio streamer, geared to both the older and 
more 
recent icecast releases. However, with the latest icecast it is 
recommended you use the libshout and ices utilities for streaming, 
which 
are also available via CVS. You must also have an encoder. I originally 
purchased the proprietary Fraunhofer codec for a couple hundred 
dollars. 
Since then, LAME has become more dynamic and can encode variable 
streams. 

There are a variety of things you can do with icecast. Many 
Internet-based 
radio stations offer real-time streaming audio in Ogg Vorbis format. 
However, 
home users may also be happy streaming a static playlist of MP3 files 
from a 
server's hard drive. Networked machines can connect to the server and 
listen 
to the current song or audio file. The latest icecast even streams 
additional 
information regarding the name and performer of the current song. 

In this article, I will explain how to install and use the icecast 
server, 
encoder, and related streamers on a vanilla Red Hat Linux 8.0 system. 
These 
instructions are not limited to Red Hat, but may be applied to almost 
any 
other Linux flavor or BSD variant. When the system is properly 
configured, 
users can listen to your network broadcasts using XMMS, Winamp, Windows 
Media Player, or any of the many other free MP3 players available. You 
have a choice of streaming both .mp3 and .ogg audio and files. However, 
a word of caution to users venturing out on the streaming audio limb -- 
the latest icecast release from CVS may be fickle. Icecast version 
1.3.12, 
however, simply works. 

To read the rest of this article, go to:
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