shoutcast/icecast yellow pages
 

Hello folk,

I am a long time Shoutcast.com fan, and a long time icecast user.
We currently run Icecast to feed 13 audio feeds to the internet, and
expect to scale to 24+ by the end of 2004. The majority of the feeds
are community service (airport, fire and rescue from the 7 local cities). We are planning to launch the first music feed around February, but the bitrate will be limited for a while (plan to try to sell a local AM stick on the feed, and maybe the local cable provider on the digital cable radio service).

I understand, by reading the icecast forums ... that YP updates from Icecast users is prohibited. Is there any reason why, other than the fact it isn't shoutcast? I'm a long time Winamp fan and user on my Windows systems, I just prefer to run Icecast because I am a command line / FreeBSD server kinda guy. Not looking to start any wars, I have my share of Windows systems along with FreeBSD x86 servers (And Silicon Graphics / Sun), and use them all daily.

It is just kind of a shame, because quite a few people used to find and listen to some of our streams back when Icecast could update the Shoutcast directory. We stream a local talk radio show from one of the FM stations and quite a few people dig it. I listen to quite a few of the shoutcast streams when I'm at our office, and feel like I'm not contributing to the community (although locally our streams are indeed quite popular).

Is there anything I could do to convince the Shoutcast team to allow Icecast updates to the directory?

For those that might be interested, this didn't totally work out -- ran out of CPU power after 8 cards and after 10 there was still flakiness with IRQs.... but hows about 12 sound cards in one PC!:
http://users.757.org/~ethan/pics/gee...card_champion/

That is the higher density system (have 2 of them) for our streams, then there is 2 off-site systems that receive more comms using directional antennas.

(The site of our streams is http://audio.hrconnect.com ... none of it is commercial, it is all free and uninterrupted with the exception of the fm99 morning show -- because they run commercials).

Icecast users were abusing the directory with false information. So Icecast and other servers were banned from the directory. It is now limited to official SHOUTcast DNAS clients only. Another case of the few ruing it for the many. But I doubt they will change their decision.

Hmp
 

Is there some sorta registration for the Shoutcast users to prevent them from abusing the system? Could the registration be extended (Is there an assigned authentication key or anything?)

I haven't seen Shoutcast in ages from the server side, so excuse my lack of knowledge for the modern versions and stream identifications.

nope, it's all based on extensive directory hit testing.

Ah
 

Ah....

So do the people register somehow, then you turn around and poll their servers for information? Or does the shoutcast servers alert the directory server then the directory server touches the servers polling the information like current song?

Just curious from a registration point of view, because if the Shoutcast people have to register, and the registration was open to icecast people it might keep the abusive users away?

Were the people misrepresenting streams or what?