Hi, I recently discovered LiquidSoap and it seems it is the streamer I have dreamed of for some months. I am the tech guru of the french webradio "Bide et Musique". I've been searching for a long time for something similar to ices but able to stream to sound cards instead of icecast, which is necessary when you want to do some hardware sound processing without resorting to dirty trick such as chained ices/icecast/player/darkice full of decoding/reencoding, and keep using unix platforms.
Our current setup is something like (using a debian) : Scheduler -> customized ices -> icecast -> transcoder -> icecast / shoutcast relays -> listeners Our scheduler is a complete automation system providing a "live" playlist computed from sets of rules associated to daily schedules, events, and external user requests. Ices is fed via the "call an external script to get a track" golden feature. It is a patched ices 0.4 (source code is available somewhere on our site) enhanced with the following features : - A "smart" crossfader able to automatically chose a good crossfading curve between tracks depending of the shape of the ending and starting songs, and also supporting per song intro/outro points (the smart feature is important : we're dealing with thousands of songs and for practical and historical reasons most of them have no entry/outro point, so the fader should try to do a good job in the general case). - Some ability to kill blank between tracks. - The ability to suspend itself and deconnect from an icecast/shoutcast and reconnect on demand. This allows us to take control of the stream for live sessions. - Periodic metadata changes (instead of just at tracks start) got form an external script. >From what I've read and seen of LiquidSoap, it seems to be able to do all of this (except maybe for "smart" crossfading ?) way better than the way we're doing it. I've long been searching for a streamer easy to interface with an external "live" scheduling system (meaning the playlist may change anytime due to external events and is constantly recomputed), and have not found anything satisfying (Rivendell is a nightmare on debian and is not easy to interface with "live" scheduling). Regards, -- Serge Danzanvilliers http://www.bide-et-musique.com
