Raspberry Pi model B - Live mp3 streaming from audio-in with DarkIce and Icecast2 on Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi model B - Live mp3 streaming from audio-in with DarkIce and Icecast2 on Raspberry Pi

Total cost for the feed computer then was under (US) $60 even including shipping. If you have a 4 gig SD card and/or USB charger already then it would even be less. And as a bonus the RPi only uses 5 watts and is silent (no fan). Not bad considering that the computer it replaced used 115 watts or more and put out more heat than the exhaust on a double tractor trailer rig.

My setup is a Raspberry Pi running headless (no keyboard or mouse) with 700 ma USB power supply (an old Motorola phone charger). It is connected to my router / cable modem with an Ethernet cable (i.e. not using USB WiFi dongle). The scanner audio output is fed to a USB soundcard like this one:


New Sound Card 5 1 USB 2 0 to 3D Audio Adapter External Virtual SA88 | eBay
that is plugged directly into the Raspberry Pi. They only cost a few dollars if you don’t mind waiting on them to arrive from China. Since no other USB devices are in use the Pi does not have any trouble powering it and therefore a powered USB hub is not required. The Pi recognized the USB sound card without any problem.

I connect to the Raspberry Pi from my Windows machine using Putty:
PuTTY: a free telnet/ssh client
via SSH protocol however I have also tried to run it at the local terminal with the X11 GUI and a bit torrent server (with reduced bandwidth) also running. The system and feed were still stable and CPU use averaged 25-33 percent. Be warned however the the USB and Ethernet share the bandwidth so if you are doing some heavy network activity while also using USB sound input then you might have some problems.

While the steps to recompile darkice are not too difficult there are a few things that were not real clear to someone unfamiliar with the method. You should still give it a go if you have a RPi to use for streaming. If there is any interest I could try to provide a modified version of the OS image so you would not have to recompile darkice. I could also offer a simple setup guide that should get most people up and running with almost no knowledge of Linux (of course it would just be a re-write of all the great information already online). The hardest part would be getting your hands on a Raspberry Pi since they are so popular that the suppliers cannot keep up with demand. In fact, I am on the waiting list now for a second one.

It should be easy enough to make a stereo feed as I believe that the USB sound device supports stereo. In my case I have no need in trying to do sterea however. Note that if you use two USB sound devices, and / or a key board and mouse, then you will no doubt need a powered USB hub and that adds $15-25 or more.


Although this thread is a little stale I thought I would add that I am streaming a mono feed using a Raspberry Pi model “B”:
Register interest for your @Raspberry_Pi.
and it is working very well. I followed these instructions:
Live mp3 streaming from audio-in with DarkIce and Icecast2 on Raspberry Pi
(and also these):
Live Audio/Ubuntu Darkice - The RadioReference Wiki
to set up darkice:
darkice - DarkIce is a live audio streamer. - Google Project Hosting
on a Raspberry Pi using the Raspbian “wheezy” image:
Downloads | Raspberry Pi