Setting up icecast2 to stream mp3s on Ubuntu

I do this every time I have to reinstall the OS on my work machine... and as you saw in the previous article, it's about that time again. I always forget to save the configuration files for it....

Let's start with this:

$ sudo apt-get install icecast2 liblame-dev build-essential \
  libxml2-dev libshout3-dev

We will be using ices to stream to the server. The package available in Ubuntu does not have mp3 support, so we're going to compile a custom one against liblame-dev. You can download ices from here: http://downloads.us.xiph.org/releases/ices/ices-0.4.tar.gz .

Run the following once you've got it:

$ tar -jxvf ices-0.4.tar.bz2
$ cd ices-0.4
$ ./configure --with-lame --prefix=/usr
$ make
$ sudo make install

Now comes the configuration. Edit /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml. Find the section about authentication and change the source password. This is the password that ices will be using to communicate with the server. Edit /etc/default/icecast2 and change "ENABLED" to true.

Start the server like so:

$ /etc/init.d/icecast2 start

You're going to need to create a log directory for ices:

$ sudo mkdir /var/log/ices && chown youruser /var/log/ices

There is a file in the ices source directory - conf/ices.conf.dist. Edit it. You'll want to change the stream name, genre, description, the name of the file that will contain your playlist, whether or not you want the playlist to be random (use 0 for no and 1 for yes), and password (use the same password that you used in the icecast2 configuration file). Save the file somewhere as ices.conf.

Now to create your playlist. Use the full path when using find like so:

$ find /home/synic/music -name "*.mp3" > ~/playlist.txt

Then, you can run ices using that configuration file:

$ ices -c ices.conf

You should then be able to connect to your station with your favorite player by using the address http://localhost:8000/ices. You can, of course, change localhost to your ip.

That's it!