[Icecast-dev] grabbing raw PCM from ices2

[Pete Yadlowsky]

Hi,

I'm running Ices 2.0.1 in conjunction with Icecast 2.3.1 (on gentoo 
linux) to generate a live ogg stream for radio station WTJU 
(http://wtju.net/). In addition to encoding and streaming live audio, 
we'd like to record our broadcasts to disk for archival. I know that 
ices has a "savefile" feature, but that isn't so useful, because the 
file being written simply grows without bound for as long as ices 
continues to run. That might be ok if the file could be periodically 
truncated to its beginning (rather than to its end), but I don't know 
any way of doing that on an open file. Also, the savefile feature writes 
the encoded data, but we'd prefer to have access to the raw PCM for 
later encoding to FLAC. (Ices is getting its data from an ALSA device; 
maybe there's some way of tapping ALSA directly? Anyway...)

What would be useful for us is some sort of audio FIFO by which other 
processes could tap ices' incoming PCM stream, without fear of filling 
the disk partition with a single ever-growing file. I have implemented 
such a FIFO as a simple circular buffer, where each "cell" in the buffer 
is a file of fixed maximum size. As each file is filled with PCM data to 
its maximum, ices moves on to the next, and round and round it goes. 
Synchronization with reader processes is achieved with file locking. 
Seems to work. Shared memory might be another way to do this.

If anyone is interested, I'm willing to supply a set of diffs.


-- 
Pete Yadlowsky
ITC Unix Systems Support
University of Virginia