After looking for something to do recently I though I may as well try to get an internet radio station to work. With an earlier attempt at this providing some information I decided to look for a guide on the internet that uses icecast2 for the streaming. And something like mpd with an easy interface for controlling what music is playing.
While searching for something to use i couldn’t find anything decent that had debian as the base OS however i did find a guide that was for arch which I found useful. Here is the link http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Streaming_With_Icecast_and_MPD. I set that up and it worked great but after awhile I noticed mpd would stuff up and from then on would refuse to play anything and the only way I could fix it was to purge it and reinstall it. Even though this was a major issue I continued on this way. After awhile I decided I wanted to do some live shows were I play “free” music that I find around the place with this i also made the realisation that I didn’t need mpd any more and something like ices2 could be used to play random music from the library when I was unable to do a live show.
Once mpd failed for the last time i set out to try and setup ices2. I had quite alot of issues with this. The first problem was connecting to the icecast server. I found out this was because it was trying to connect to the stream that had a different user name then the default source one I quickly fixed that. My next issue was the temporary playlist while I figured out some sort of timeslot system. The only really problem with this is that ices2 for a basic playlist wants a full path to the file to be played and it wants them all on there own line. This wouldn’t be a issue if the library was only a few songs big. But at that time the library at already grown to 3Gb or so which translates to alot of paths to enter. I quickly set out to find some sort of script that could do it for me. I found this here (Which is an epic bash script) http://www.debianhelp.org/node/1167. What that does is greats simple playlists in each directory of music starting from the current working directory. This made my life way easier. So far I have been running ices2 non-stop and it hasn’t failed yet. My next mission is to write or find a script that during certain hours will only return a random song from a certain directory.
The link to the statistics page and links to the m3u file for the stream is http://radio.jonys.info:8000/. If you want to skip that you can use some music player such as vlc for linux or winamp for windows. Point vlc’s network stream to http://radio.jonys.info:8000/live.ogg . For winamp add a item to the playlist and select URL and then enter http://radio.jonys.info:8000/live.ogg .
If you have any other questions feel free to leave a comment or contact me via identi.ca/jony123