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17.05.2007 Outsourcing music

I am having a day off from everything. These are the days I want to listen to music all the time and take it easy. Yesterday I needed to configure an icecast server to help a friend in his hacking project. When I got it working, it wasn’t needed anymore. Also, the server kept requesting credentials and I decided to upgrade to icecast2. I was going to stop there but the Ed Rush gig I was going to see was canceled. I ended up streaming some music to my friends. My somehow unstable desktop crashed while I was streaming. I restarted and it must have been after 5 a.m. until it crashed again.

I wasn’t quite happy with my xmms + liveice-ng + icecast2 streaming in the first place but I decided to outsource my music playback to my more stable server. This was not the first time my desktop crashes when I am listening to music. I uploaded some music to my server and configured liveice to run in shout mode. I was happy, until I wanted to skip a track. I spent some time Googling for different solutions. Most of them seemed to be for Windows and the others had to be plugged into /dev/dsp. Then I found a blog post that solved my problem. I had heard of mpd before but somehow I had forgot about it as well.

I have been really frustrated with icecast1 many times before. The access control is hardly documented and nothing seems to work out of box. The init.d script that comes with Ubuntu still seems to fail restarting icecast2 every time but at least all I had to do was to configure the mountpoint and change some passwords. To me, mpd is still the cherry on top. It gives me an endless stream of music without me actively intervening. This is the way I am going to listen to my music from now on. I still haven’t had the time to configure a VPN so I could bring my music to the office as well.