Server diagram

I stumbled upon the problem of broadcasting sound(live, prerecorded or just music) over IP on a one-to-many network topology and setup a nice solution that works on a generic server machine.

You can do this by hosting a digital radio server and broadcasting the sound; to get external access you'll need a real IP address or static DNS, you can get it from your ISP; in case you want to go public, a licence to stream audio will be required.

What you need to set this up wll be a audio server - I used IceCast2 - , you'll also need an audio feeder that will feed audio to this server, I used Ices2. Ices2 can either read audio data from disk (Ogg Vorbis files), or sample live audio from a sound card and encode it on the fly. I deployed everything to a RaspeberryPi 3+ running Raspbian..

Install IceCast2

update apt-get

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo reboot
						

install necessary packages. Note: The names can vary slightly according to Linux distribution

$ sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxslt1-dev curl vorbis-tools libogg-dev libvorbis-dev libshout3-dev
						

for IceCast2 I downloaded this version: icecast-2.4.3.tar.gz untar and install

$ tar -xvf icecast-2.4.3.tar.gz
$ cd icecast-2.4.3
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
						

edit the config file

$ sudo nano /usr/local/etc/icecast.xml
edit location tag:
	replace 'Earth' with something else
change port:
	<listen­socket> 
       <port>8003</port> 
	</listen­socket>
						

start icecast

$ icecast -c /usr/local/etc/icecast.xml
						

Check what's happening on port 8003:

$ netstat -tnlp | grep 8003
						

and kill it
OR
Replace 8003 with some unused port
you can encouter this error:
If everything worked fine you'll be able to access localhost:8003 and see this image:

IceCast2 server UI

Ok, now we have the radio server up and running and waiting for some audio streams. To get the audio streams we have several options. I choose IceS2 which is a source client for Icecast streaming server. It's purpose is to provide an audio stream to IceCast. IceS can run on the same machine or a different one, so we can steam the data from the network.

Install IceS2

Now we'll install IceS2 and all dependencies

install ices2

$ apt-get install ices2
						

create folder path setup

$ sudo mkdir /var/log/ices
$ sudo mkdir /etc/ices2
$ sudo mkdir /etc/ices2/music
						

copy template config file

$ sudo cp /usr/share/doc/ices2/examples/ices-playlist.xml /etc/ices2
						

edit config file

$ sudo nano /etc/ices2/ices-playlist.xml
						

changes to run in background:
<background>0</background>
To
<background>1</background>

changes to log in console:
<console>0</console>
To
<console>1</console>

point to the playlist file:
<input>
<module>playlist</module>
...
<param name="/home/pi/Music/playlist.txt">
</input>

create the playlist in /home/pi/Music/playlist.txt and add songs to it.

Note: IceS2 doaes not support mp3, so the playlist should contain for eg .ogg files.

run IceS2:

$ ices2 /etc/ices2/ices-playlist.xml
						

If there are no errors it should look like this:

IceCast2 server UI