What is Icecast?
Icecast is an open source streaming media server that allows you to broadcast audio content to listeners in real-time over the internet. It is designed to work well with Ogg Vorbis and MP3 audio formats.
Some key features of Icecast include:
- Support for multiple streams and mount points so you can have multiple radio stations and DJs broadcasting on one server
- Listener statistics so you can see how many people are listening at any given time
- Metadata support for displaying song titles and artist info to listeners
- Support for fallback streams in different bitrates to dynamically adjust quality based on a listener's bandwidth
- Authentication and access control for managing user permissions
- A web-based admin interface for managing settings and viewing server stats
Icecast runs on Linux and Windows servers and can scale to support hundreds of concurrent listeners. It works seamlessly with streaming clients and source clients like BUTT, Oddcast, Edcast, Mixxx, and more to provide a complete streaming audio infrastructure.