Blog - /Tech

One of my accomplishments while a webmaster at PLUG was to set up several Internet radio feeds by using a combination of MusicPD and Icecast 2. MusicPD runs really well — each feed only takes 20% of the CPU cycles on an 800MHz machine — so it was a good choice for us. I recently had to revisit the issue in order to work around a bug in MusicPD 0.13.0, so I thought it was about time to write about how I did this.

In the 0.13.0 release, MusicPD has a feature/bug where if you only define a shoutcast audio output, it assumes that you meant to define a normal output as well, and tries OSS and ALSA outputs. That's not good for a remote Internet radio setup where all I really want is shoutcast! It was causing the radio feeds to not start at all. To work around this issue, I had to tell MusicPD to use the "null" driver for libao, in addition to shoutcast.

The complete guide that I wrote on this subject is available at My Notes: Make Your Own Radio Station.