The answer is: liquidsoap.

liquidsoap, a swiss-army knife for multimedia streaming, notably used for netradios and webtvs. It has tons of features, it's free and it's open-source!

It took me some days to understand how streams are generated. liquidsoap consists of little scripts which describe the stream parameters. a simple script which loads and plays a mp3-playlist, let's call it basic.liq, is show below:

#!/usr/bin/liquidsoap



# load a playlist file

stream = playlist("/path/to/playlist.pls")



# output the playlist to icecast

source = output.icecast(%mp3, host="localhost", port="8000",

         mount="listen.m3u", password="hackme")

source(stream)

test the script with:

liquidsoap --check ./basic.liq

and start the script with:

liquidsoap ./basic.liq &

but liquidsoap is much more powerful. for example, to play a jingle every full hour, simply add:

# add a jingle every full hour

jingle = single("/path/to/jingle.mp3")

add([stream,switch([({0m0s},jingle)])])

but a lot more features are described at the homepage:

• static or dynamic playlists


• time-based selection of the audio source


• quota- or time-based insertions or mixes of jingles


• live DJ interventions


• interactive user requests


• fully-customizable transitions, e.g. crossfading


• speech-synthesis of track metadata


• simple access to remote files


• and much more

It's worth taking a look at the quick start guide, a more complex example and the documentation there.