In-house Audio Streaming

Lots of users have gigabytes of music in their personal computer, but every time when we want to listen to music on our portable device, we need to copy selectively some songs to the device and then listen. You can listen to all the songs from your PC itself. But what if your girl friend wants to watch videos and you have only one computer in your house? Now stop fighting, leave the computer with you girl friend and start your music stream to connect from your Android or any mobile with streaming audio playback support.

How is that is what we will be looking in this post, it is quite simple, read on.

I am using a Fedora, which is a RPM based ditro, so I will use yum to install and update my packages. If you are using some other distribution based on Debian, then you will be using aptitude.

The first package we need is icecast, which is a streaming media server.

$ sudo yum install icecast

icecast works on mount points. A mount point is where the source (which does the actual music conversion, decoding and encoding) send all the music to. We will do a basic, working configuration and test it.

The configuration for icecast is XML based. The default configuration given by icecast is good enough, except for adding an extra listen socket with your local IP.

<listen-socket>
        <port>8000</port>
        <bind-address>192.168.1.2</bind-address>
</listen-socket>

Change the IP above to you computer’s IP, so you connect from another system or device.

Now for the next package called ezstream.

$ sudo yum install ezstream

Examples for ezstream configuration is located in /usr/share/doc/ezstream/examples/

Copy the example configuration file which says ezstream_mp3.xml to some nice folder (your home or Music folder will be fine). Before changing any configurations for ezstream, it would be better if had tested icecast, Now copy some mp3 file to /usr/share/icecast/web directory and start the icecast server.

$ icecast -b -c /etc/icecast.xml

the option -b tells icecast to run in the background and -c is used to pass the config file to icecast. Now, from your browser open the URL like (of course, change the IP to your IP, or use localhost if on the same system)

http://192.168.1.2:8000/example.mp3

Now, your browser should be able to playback the streamed audio file. If this is not working check for the log file in /var/log/icecast else leave a comment, we can try to figure out the issue.

Ok, moving on to ezstream configuration, the default is good enough, just make sure that the username and password for source matches that of the same in icecast configuration file. Also check the mount point, IP and URL.

<ezstream>
    <url>http://localhost:8000/stream</url>
    <sourcepassword>hackme</sourcepassword>
    <format>MP3</format>
    <filename>playlist.m3u</filename>
    <!-- Once done streaming playlist.m3u, exit: -->
    <stream_once>1</stream_once>

You can see the playlist.m3u, that’s what we need to create now. Assuming we are in a folder which has audio files organised by folders, we will create the m3u files using find.

$ find . -name "*.mp3" > playlist.m3u

The final thing is to start streaming.

$ ezstream -c ezstream_mp3.xml

This should start streaming your music, and you should able to listen through your browser or players like Rhythmbox or Totem.

Where does Android come here?

Android is not required, you just need any phone with Wifi and a stream media playback capable player. If you are using Android, then install “Stream media Player”, open it, click on internet radio, give your URL as

http://192.168.1.2:8000/stream

where stream is the mount point you defined in the icecast and ezstream configuration files. Now you don’t have to be with the PC to listen to your songs, all you require is extended wifi range, so you can sit in your garden and relax, without keeping you PC speakers in full volume and scaring the hell out of your neighbours.