[icecast] Icecast, Liveice... experiences?

[Ethan]

Hello.

 We have been using LiveIce to serve mp3 streams for 10 months or so. So
far, IceCast has been pretty reliable. Well, until LiveIce is introduced
into the picture. We originally tried LiveIce running on FreeBSD. It ran
for a while, but we suffered wierd problems: disconnects, skips and
such. We are streaming from a radio receiver -- at 28800 compatible
bitrates. 

 So we switched to the WinAmp plugin from the Shoutcast site. We easily
manage 2 month uptimes without problems. However... It is a Windows
program, and Unix is our friend.

 So recently I've decided to expand. That is, add some other audio
streams. I scrapped together 3 systems to act as encoding hosts. Loaded
FreeeBSD 4.5 + current Lame + LiveIce + Screen on them all. Perfect I
think! Small footprint, I can line them up with a network switch in the
corner of my bedroom and serve content.

 But now it is making IceCast unstable. I first hit problems when
decreasing the bitrate to 16000 and the sample rate to 11025. I tried to
move things back up, but it seems to be completley unstable and a mess.

 Does anyone have suggestions? By leaving LAME and trying to go with L3ENC
or whatever the current version is -- will that improve stability? Anyone
have any tips? I really don't want to go the Windows route -- but I don't
want to babysit the stuff either. LiveIce seems like an okay application
-- except stability. Is there anything else to feed live audio outside of
LiveIce? 

 We have tried LiveIce on Linux, on FreeBSD, on FreeBSD with Linux
emualtion. Then we were getting soundcard problems.

 Recently I tried LiveIce on the following:
 FreeBSD 4.5, 64MB x 3
  One system has OPL3Sax
  One system has ADsomething generic card
  One system has Ensoniq

  The AD something is kind of nasty, if you bail out of liveice twice --
it will no longer talk to the sound card until a reboot.

 Once again, feeding audio from radio receivers is the project. Not
playing MP3 playlists. And we operate at really low bitrates (It is local
EMS and stuff, so high quality isn't needed).

<p>                                        -- Ethan

<p><p>--- >8 ----
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