We've opened Evenings up to Icecast
We've added Icecast ingest to Evenings, so stations running BUTT, Mixxx, Liquidsoap, darkice, or a hardware encoder that speaks the Icecast source protocol can go live with the setup they already have.
Why we started with RTMP
When we started building Evenings, we had to pick one protocol for getting a station's audio onto our servers. The two real options were Icecast and RTMP.
Icecast has carried internet radio for more than 25 years. It's open source, the protocol is simple, and a whole family of tools grew up around it. RTMP came out of the Flash era and stuck around because so much of today's streaming software, OBS and Audio Hijack among them, uses it to send a live stream to a server.
We were new to all of this, and RTMP had far more server examples and people to learn from, so we built on it first. It got Evenings off the ground, and we'd make the same call again. But we knew it left out stations that had built their setups on Icecast years before we came along, and that bothered us. So we went back and built Icecast ingest alongside RTMP, so no station has to rebuild its chain to broadcast with us.
How it works
Your encoder connects to Evenings the way it would connect to any Icecast server. The one difference is the mountpoint: where an Icecast server would use it as the path your stream lives at, we use it to carry your stream key, the same key you'd paste into OBS. That's how we know the stream is yours. From there, your audio goes through the same pipeline as every other broadcast, and when you stop, the recording saves to your Library.
Our BUTT guide walks through the exact server settings. BUTT is free, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and is written and maintained by Daniel Nöthen. It's where we'd point any station that wants a simple Icecast encoder.
Thank you, Xiph.Org
Icecast is maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation, a non-profit that keeps some of the foundations of internet audio free and open. Icecast, and a lot of the radio built on it, exists because of their work. If Icecast has been part of your station, consider donating to Xiph.Org.
If you'd rather run the whole station yourself, AzuraCast is a free, self-hosted radio suite built on Icecast and Liquidsoap, and it's a good one. Evenings is for stations that want scheduling, an archive of every show and a station page without running their own server.
What's next
The Evenings mobile broadcaster connects over the same Icecast protocol, so this work is also the groundwork for going live from your phone. We're building it now and will share more once it's in stations' hands.
If you're running Icecast through Liquidsoap or a hardware encoder, send your setup to contact@evenings.email. We want to see how it holds up.