[icecast] OddcastDSP/Winamp2

[oddsock at oddsock.org]

>
> "as someone who makes a living from streaming media, I've done quite a
> bit of work with Oddcast and in my view it is way too flaky to rely on.
> Compared with the Shoutcast plug-in, which unfortunately doesn't do
> Vorbis, it's very buggy, temperamental in terms of which systems it
> will work with, has some problems associated with saving archived
> streams which is important for on demand listening, and this is all off
> the top of my head.  I've had several dozen people test it in different
> situations.  In my view it is simply unfit for wide scale deployment.
> It's a shame because with the right tools, I would look at going Vorbis
> for at least some of our streams.  On our Linux server on which we
> handle all our streams, we have an Icecast 2 server running. Linux
> users are having no problems streaming to it and it looks to me like
> Icecast2 itself is now very solid indeed.  Like most things in Linux it
> stays up for days at a time.  It's a shame Nullsoft won't be coming out
> with a stable DSP plug-in for Vorbis streaming.  Hopefully as demand
> builds among Windows users, someone will do the job."  --- Director of
> ACB Radio (http://www.acbradio.org)
these are all very valid points, but consider the following.  I, and I
suspect some others as well, write open source software to provide people
free (or otherwise cheap) options to problems that are traditionally solved
by proprietary or non-open software.  Saying it's "unfit for wide scale
deployment" is also not an entirely fair statement.  Personally, I know of
a least a few hundred people (possibly many more even) that use oddcast
effectively and like it very much, so not sure how "wide scale deployment"
is really defined.

your choices in the windows streaming world are definately small, and if
you add "open and free" to that, your list becomes incredibly small.

in general, I don't mind criticisms for the stuff I do...stuff like "gosh
man, your code is completely messed, why don't you clean it up" or "please
fix your resampling logic so that I can resample my stream to 32kHz" are
perfectly appropriate (and quite true) :)  But criticisms that don't allow
me to fix things "Your software is too buggy", "doesn't work on some
platforms", those are not terribly helpful.

>
> For me personally, I only have a problem with OddCast when using the
> SQRSoft crossfading plugin.    I need to use this crossfader as there
> is nothing else that works so well and sounds so professional.  I use
> it for my LPFM broadcast.  It works fine for most configurations except
> when Oddcast is set to 22khz mono which is what I prefer.  Winamp2
> crashes immediately.  I have just ordered a DSL connection which I wish
> to use for streaming but currently I can't without compromising the
> sound quality and going to stereo.
The SQRSoft crossfading plugin may be a great plugin, but has proven many
times in the past to be very buggy.  To do what they do, they need to
simulate loading a winamp DSP the way winamp does, if they don't do it
properly  (in the past this is true), then problems will arise.  I wrote a
winamp2 plugin, not a SQRSoft crossfading plugin, so sorry but I can't help
you there.
>
> I know that a number of linux users are streaming successfully,
> however, like it or not, most people are using Windows and we really
> need a streaming client to work reliably.  Oddsock does not appear to
> have the time to work on it.
on the contrary, I am constantly working on oddcast...I spend quite of bit
of time on it actually...over the last 6 months I've completely re-written
it (from the ground up), build it into a series of libraries and tools
which use the core encoding library, streamTranscoder was the first
incarnation of this (which runs on win32 and linux, in both UI and non UI
mode), then a winamp3 plugin as well (win32), an XMMS plugin (linux), a
Foobar2000 plugin (win32), and soon a Core Media Player plugin (win32), and
yes, a new winamp2 version of oddcastv2 is next as well.  and this is just
oddcast, I have quite a few other tools as well, in addition to a bit of
pride for what I am doing.  All this and a full-time job adds up to a *lot*
of work.  Sure, it may be slow in development, and sure it may be buggy,
but thats the way it is...
> I'm not sure if the source for OddCast is
> available.
yes, it is available. http://cvs.casterclub.com/horde/chora/cvs.php?
login=2&rt=CVS.ODDSOCK.ORG

oddsock

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