Icecast 2.0 Released

ArcRiley writes "After 3 years of development and 6 weeks of beta testing, Icecast 2.0 has been officially released! Features include support for both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, a web administration interface, support for listing in directories (such as dir.xiph.org), and is freely available under the GNU GPL for Linux and Windows."

Comments

Icecast is great..

[iantri]

Icecast is a great piece of software.. I use it to stream music to myself when I am away from my PC.

Any idea if there is a better interface for controlling which songs play, yet?

Before, IIRC it could only shuffle through a bunch of files in a directory.

Autodisconnect from relays

[kaos_]

I'd like to run Icecast in our office relaying to some external streams to utilize bandwidth for many listeners. Unfortunately, Icecast stays connected to the relays even when there are no listeners, which is a waste. I remember earlier versions of Icecast had this feature, but it has now since gone.

for non-pro/home broadcasting to take off

[osmethnee]

for non-pro/home broadcasting to take off, there needs to be an underlying p2p network layer. This is particularly true as live video-streaming becomes more popular. http://www.peercast.org/ exists, but sadly doesn't seem to have been updated for 9 months, and activity in their forum is fairly low.

Alternative Ogg codecs?

[FrostedWheat]

Does this support non-Vorbis Ogg codecs such as Speex or FLAC?

Icecast vs. Shoutcast?

[alexatrit]

I used to run small stations in college, using Shoutcast on both Windows and FreeBSD. Very simple to install and run. I've read the Icecast FAQ, and I'm a bit confused. It says that it's compatible with Shoutcast servers. Does this mean shoutcast.com's listing servers? Has anyone seen how Shoutcast and Icecast compare as far as memory footprint, system usage, bandwidth usage? or are they more or less the same?

I have to admit

[silence535]

that I was somehow annoyed that they declared the old version (1.3.2 or something?) as deprecated long time before releasing 2.0. And the website has been unmaintained for quite a long period of those three years.
Actually I turned off my little community-radio-streaming-project just because ogg support was flaky and administration and monitoring was difficult.

But hey, it is always easy to bitch and not to help hands on.

Maybe now Iwill pick up this thing again..

-silence

Ogg rules

[wfberg]

.. especially for streaming, since a 64kbps stream sounds as good as a 128kbps mp3 stream, which means more people can listen to it, even on their congested at-work LANs, and if you don't attract more people, then at least you cut your bandwidth bill in half. Other codecs that sound sweet at 64kbps exist (windows media, real, quicktime) but they're not free, so you end up paying more than you save in bandwidth.

And if you go legal with your streams, some licensing authorities (for want of a better word) haven't been clued in to how good ogg sounds at half the bitrate, so they'll give you a sucky-quality discount.

If you want to go legal w.r.t. streaming BigFive content in The Netherlands, I don't recommend it btw. BUMA/Stemra seem to have a process in place that's relatively sane (i.e. flat fee for non-commercial use) but you ALSO have to pay SENA (not that it's not spelled SANE..) who are total fucktards in their pricingstructure (BUMA/Stemra are fucktards as well, but at least the pricing schedules seem doable. Anyway, having investigated the options I decided against it (and no, I don't stream unlicensed either).