[Icecast] Stream drops during handoff. Suggestions?

[Ian A. Underwood]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but I've searched high and low for 
the last couple days for an answer.

An Internet radio station I DJ for is using Shoutcast and MP3, but we 
are considering moving to an Icecast/Ogg Vorbis combination instead.  We 
work in 3-hour shifts.  When we hand off, the DJ on-stream stops teh 
encoder, shouts "go" on IRC, and the DJ in line starts his encoder.

However, one thing I'm finding in my testing is that during a simulated 
handoff on a test server, stream listeners are disconnected.  The only 
workaround I've found for this is to run a near-silent failover stream 
which fills in the blank spot until the main encoder is re-started.

Is this solution the only way to go about preserving the stream between 
shows?  Is it possible to store a short vorbis file on the server which 
can provide the silence instead of running a backup stream to it?  Is 
there something I totally missed?

-I