iceflac

A FLAC audio streamer for Icecast servers.

What? Why?

My friend wanted to create a webradio using lossless audio files. This task was very hard in the open-source-way, so I decided to create a FLAC streamer application for Icecast, because it's a working solution. The targeted operating system was Windows, but the Icecast-libshout library was nearly impossible to compile, so I wrote a lightweight version of it.

This program only works with FLAC files.

Libraries

Required libraries:

• libogg : https://github.com/gcp/libogg
• flac : https://github.com/xiph/flac
• mxml : https://github.com/michaelrsweet/mxml

Build - Windows

Compile everything as Release into a STATIC library, so without the .DLL files. Copy the necessary files to the lib directory, it should look like this:

.
+-- lib
    +-- libFLAC_static.lib
    +-- libogg_static.lib
    +-- mxmlstat.lib

Copy the include directories from flac/include, libogg/include, mxml/*.h to the include directory, it should look like this:

.
+-- include
    +-- FLAC (flac/include/FLAC)
    +-- mxml (mxml/*.h, create this directory)
    +-- ogg  (libogg/include/ogg)

Open the iceflac/iceflac.sln and compile the code. If everything was done correctly the iceflac.exe will be in the build/Release(Debug) directory.

Build - Linux

Compile and install every library.

Ubuntu 20.04:

sudo apt-get install -y libogg-dev libflac-dev
cd lib
git clone https://github.com/michaelrsweet/mxml.git
cd mxml
./configure
make 
sudo make install
cd ../..

Then use the Makefile:

make

The iceflac binary will be in the build build directory.

Usage

Copy the settings/iceflac.xml next to the iceflac executable. Modify the content of the iceflac.xml. To use such a high bitrate a FLAC can provide modify the <limits> / <queue-size> setting in the configuration file of the icecast server. My setting is <queue-size>111524288</queue-size>.

iceflac.exe -p playlist.txt

where playlist.txt is a text file, where every line contains the path of a .FLAC file.

Use iceflac --help for additional informaton.

TODO

• Support for UTF-8 filenames
• Fix warnings
• Clean the code

Thanks to

• the developers of Icecast (https://icecast.org)
• the developers of ogg/flac (https://xiph.org)
• the developer of Mini-XML (https://www.msweet.org/mxml)
• Little Star Media for the base64 code (https://github.com/littlstar/b64.c)

License

Use, modify as you wish, just mention me in your README ;)