[Icecast] Local & Relay

[Geoff Shang]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2011, Ian Bonham wrote:

> I work for a Radio station on the Costa Del Sol in Spain, and
> currently we're using DarkIce to take an audio feed (over USB) from
> our desk into DarkIce and then sending up to a hosted IceCast2 server.
> This works perfectly, and I have a cronjob programmed to start a new
> feed every hour as we also record each hour for logging purposes.
>
> Now however, some presenters wish to do their shows from home or
> remote locations. They are only really technically able to use
> SimpleCast.
>
> My theoretical solution is to install IceCast on my streaming machine,
> and have them connect to mountpoints on that. The stream may well be
> arriving at the main studio in OGG (if I get my way!). Then I think
> I'll need IceCast to make that stream available on a port on 127.0.0.1
> at some random address as it's behind the studios firewall.

By default, Icecast will bind to all available interfaces, so you should 
be able to reach it at 127.0.0.1 even if it's also on a public IP address.

> Then I'll
> need something on the machine to play the stream on that port on the
> machine to stdout, and have DarkIce read the stream from stdin as
> opposed to playing from the USB Virtual Soundcard the desk is attached
> to. This can then send to our hosted IceCast server.

You could do this, but it would require getting Darkice to drop and 
reconnect, which you may not want to do.  It also would mean some kind of 
co-ordination between the drop/reconnect and the remote broadcaster 
connecting, a recipe for trouble if say they don't show on time for 
example.

> I 'could' just have IceCast running on the streaming computer, working
> as a relay to our hosted server I guess, and switch the relay source
> from Local Audio Card to a Local Icecast mount point, but I'm not sure
> how I would set this up.

If you wanted to go this route, you could use fallback mounts to achieve 
this.  But all streams would have to be in the same format.

> The hosted server is on Centova and is not that flexible through their
> control panels as far as I can see, so ideally I would just like to
> send them one stream to one mountpoint and switch the sources in my
> main studios.

Makes sense.

> Has anyone tried this sort of thing before, and can you suggest any
> methods please?
>
The other option, and it's one you may want to consider, is have somehting 
local play the incoming stream through your desk and encode as usual. 
This way, you're completely in control of the process and the remote 
signal only goes through when it's meant to.  But I guess this depends 
what you use for playout etc.  And of course it means you reencode, but 
you may need to do that anyway.

Geoff.