Internal mount points for outside broadcast workflows

Additional internal mountpoints allows internal audio workflows, typically to transmit audio from remote locations into the main studio, as with outside broadcasts or external contribution partners.

Setup

Stations can request either 1 or 5 additional icecast mountpoints to be activated on their stream.

• Add 1 additional mountpoint at R50 per month for Community or Commercial stream packages.
• Add 5 additional internal mountpoints for R150 per month, available on Commercial stream package only.

Once enabled, customers can select their own names for these internal mountpoints and our support staff will provide the exact connection details.

Usage

Once enabled, stations can send icecast audio streams into these mountpoints from their remote locations and pull this audio using any application that will read an icecast stream.

Example mountpoint name:

http://12.34.56.78/123_outsidebroadcast

• Where outsidebroadcast is one of the customer configurable names.
• Internal mountpoints can receive valid icecast audio stream of any format or bitrate.
• They require the same username and password used for the primary input stream, as provided during signup.

Latency

Icecast in general is designed for serving one-to-many audio to a lot of listeners and is not optimised for low-latency audio. Latency on these streams can range from between 5 to 20 seconds or more depending on the which tools, format and bitrate is used.

General guidelines:

• Higher bitrates typically have lower latencies. Most overheads are associated with buffering, and higher bitrate audio can fill up set buffer sizes quicker. There are diminishing returns on this, so 256k will not necessary have half the latency of 128k. We recommend using 160k AAC or MP3.
• Use the right application for playback. Do not use a browser for playback but rather a dedicated audioplayback tool. We recommend using VLC.