

Artist and title information is automatically generated. There’s space to fill in the name of your broadcast, a genre, an AIM screen name, and a Web address. Next, you’ll want to provide a little bit of information to go along with your stream-especially if you plan on listing to your broadcast on Stream Tracker, which Nicecast can automatically do. In my case, I would be using iTunes, which was already chosen for me by default. To get started, you choose the source of your broadcast.

If that weren’t enough, Nicecast also offers an assortment of effect plug-ins and the ability to DJ your broadcast with voice-overs and save archives of your broadcasts. Fresh out of the gate with a version 1.0 release, Nicecast will have you broadcasting online with practically a single mouse click. If you ever thought running your own Internet radio station would be too complicated and too expensive, you thought wrong. Trial: Static is overlaid on all broadcast audio after 20 minutes.
#Nicecast para windows mac os x
In this article, we compare the two most popular streaming servers, Icecast and Shoutcast, and explore which one might be right for you.Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 and an Internet or Intranet connection. The history of Icecast and Shoutcast goes back to the early days of internet radio. In 1998, during a time when Winamp was gaining popularity as MP3 player software, Nullsoft created Shoutcast (DNAS) as a competitor to RealAudio, the dominant audio and video streaming technology of the day. The key differentiator of Shoutcast was that it streamed MP3 compressed audio instead of RealAudio's proprietary codecs. This occurred right at the beginning of broadband adoption in the Western world, at a time when bandwidth was beginning to become less constrained and the average modem speed was creeping beyond 56K. (An even bigger opportunity came Winamp's way a year later, with the release of Napster, which propelled compressed audio technology into ubiquity.) By combining high bitrates and better compression, higher quality audio streaming was possible with the MP3 codec, and Nullsoft was quick to jump on this opportunity and create an ecosystem where Shoutcast could serve internet radio streams and Winamp could play those streams. Icecast was first released in 1999 as an open source alternative to proprietary and patent-encumbered streaming audio technologies of the day, which included both RealAudio and Shoutcast. In 2004, Icecast 2 brought improved metadata support, compatibility with Shoutcast clients, and more advanced configuration options, which were features that lead to widespread adoption in the internet radio community. There's one twist - In 2012, Karl Heyes forked a branch of Icecast called Icecast-KH, to overhaul some of the internals and multithreaded performance, as well as add some experimental features like listener authentication. Over the years, this branch has served as a test bed for new Icecast features, and due to author's closer collaboration with industry, many of these features were built at the request of stream hosting providers. As a result, Icecast-KH has become the defacto Icecast server used by most streaming hosting companies.

A list of differences between Icecast and Icecast-KH is available here. The exact list of codecs that are supported by Icecast and Shoutcast is somewhat nebulous. The Icecast homepage says "Ogg (Vorbis and Theora), Opus, WebM and MP3", without mentioning AAC at all, which is one of the most popular codecs today. Similarly, the Shoutcast homepage doesn't mention any codecs beyond MP3 and AAC ("up to 320 kbps"). To find out which codecs Icecast and Shoutcast actually support, we tested them with each codec that Rocket Broadcaster can encode: Codec Warning: As of January 2019, the latest release of Shoutcast (2.6) no longer supports AAC streaming. Directory listing: Many broadcasters choose Shoutcast because they want to have their stream advertised on the directory.Icecast and Shoutcast are very similar feature-wise, but there are some differences to consider depending on your use case: The removal of this feature is intentional or just a bug.Īlso note that older versions of Icecast (such as 2.3) had issues with AAC streams stuttering or having choppy playback. However, there's dozens of stream directories on the web that you can submit your Icecast has a similar directory, though it has lower visibility. Radio stream to for free, including TuneIn (the largest by far), so we don't recommend basis your decision off this feature.
