Icecast Streaming Media Server

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to use icecast to stream the entire output of one computers sound card to other system? Forgive my noobness, I have been at a million forums today for differnet software packages trying to figure out which one will best suite my needs.

I have 3 rooms, with 4 channel sound in each room hooked up to a computer, rooms are in easy ear shot so sync is imperative.

any help would be appreciated

[Anonymous]

Icecast's purpose (and ability) is to create a streaming music source. You could easily server the music to each of the other rooms.

However, sync is always going to be a problem for you. Whenever you encode sound data, you introduce some lag.

For example, with our radio station, the online stream runs about 4 seconds behind the FM. This is because of encoding and delivery delays.

When sync is important, the radio guys use microwave. That's beside the point for your situation.

It seems to me that you're trying to do things in an odd way. That's a lot of computers for a pretty simple task. Why not run some decent audio wire from your source, directly to the rooms? It would solve your sync issues, and you wouldn't have so many moving parts.

I may be mistaken, but I think any software encoding would break your sync in this instance. I'd hardwire.

If you've got more details, maybe I can provide something more helpful.

[Anonymous]

thks for your help, I guess you saved me a lot of time messing with this then. 4 seconds is way to much of a delay. running wires is not really an option. It would not work with this setup, I would need more hardware and also the db drop on the preamp is not acceptable.

http://www.q2s.ntnu.no/~asbjs/ldas/ldas.html

Maybe I can get this working.

[Anonymous]

You can likely get the clients almost synced with each other; but the clients will always be a bit behind the source. That may or may not be a problem, depending on your needs. If you aren't listening to the source, you won't know the difference.

For example, all the web listeners on our station are a few seconds behind. They don't know it, as they aren't usually listening to the FM. Two computers listening the the stream are in sync with each other (assuming decent network and whatnot), but are delayed in relation to the source.

Hope this helps.