[icecast] IceCast Questions.... ("id3 tags, mp3, Ogg, etc)

[Ethan]

> How would you "switch" the users, I mean on the fly? Rewrite the
> configs so that you define the mountpoint from with the main server
> relays anew and give icecast2 a SIGHUP to re-read config?
> Anybody tried such things in practice?

I currently do something like that (I kill and restart icecast every night
at midnight so the record-to-file script can change the config to update
the current date...). It knocks users off.

> Together with this topic I might bring up the topic of a radio
> automation system. Maybe there are some tools out there, freely
> available? I don't want to / can't purchase a commercial system for
> 3000$ or something to do automation. But it should support things
> like automatic fading based on the songs (endings / beginnings of a
> song), be able to use categories to build a well-balanced playlist,
> play jingles from time to time etc.

I've looked around for a unix solution and haven't found much. I was
thinking about trying to use a system with a soundcard or three, and maybe
a midi controlled mixer (I think MOTU made a 1u rackmount midi controlled
8 stereo port mixer or such). Not really an elegant solution though, but
we could make a table that has the song name and weather or not to do a
cross fade or a hard cut (some songs end on a cymbal crash or whatever).

I was looking at NetJukebox or such, some php based playlist builder.
Figured if we categorized stuff that would be okay, but that would require
manually adding commercials and such.

> Also a Linux-solution for
> combining this with live-talk (moderation) would be really much
> appreciated. Does somebody know of any such solution out there?

We thought long and hard, and the decision was if we were ever to do a
system where people could manipulate the station from remote (over
broadband) we would probably push to use web based interface for cueing up
the "decks" and a SSH/Curses based "deck" interface that way the
responsiveness is QUICK. There is still the issue that if streaming mp3
was used for the DJ voice over then the buffers would have to be nearly
eliminated in order to get rid fo the delay. I think it would be rough.

> I heard from time to time that many people of you are doing >10
> streams. Do you just use playlists - or maybe tools like the above
> mentioned to have fading between tracks etc. to make it sound better?

We are using it for local police / fire / rescue / air traffic type of
feeds. I just got two new (used) computers that have 16 PCI slots each.
Got 4 sound cards working in one, and monday we are going to try to get it
up to 10 in one system (which is at the point that there isn't much CPU
left, darkice @ the low bitrate at 0.8 quality *SHOULD* be able to do 10
streams on the PIII-600). Right now we have 4 Pentium II-266's each with
FreeBSD and 3 sound cards.

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