[linux-audio-dev] Re: Jack compatible LAME streamers (oddcast, ices2, darkice?)

[ben racher]

So I messed around for a little bit and found something that kinda 
works. I was routing alsa-player in ardour (all this with jack of 
course), my sound card input also into ardour, mixing the two channels 
in ardour, and outputting the master out of ardour into oddcast, which 
then sent to icecast server, which I connected to with xmms, which sent 
the audio to soundcard output.

And here was the trick. I increased the buffer size in Jack from 1024 to 
4096 which consumed far less cpu resources therefore decreasing 
ringbufferfull errors from oddcast, and I also used jack.plumbing to do 
whatever it does between oddcast and ardour, which kept the stream from 
crashing. So now whenever I get the ringbuffer full error, the stream 
just jitters as long as the error persists, and seemed to return back to 
normal as soon as cpu resources became available again. So... sort of a 
solution.

I'm hoping that in actual practice, I'll be able to divide some of these 
tasks between multiple machines, probably have oddcast running on its 
own machine, and pumping in an audio stream with jack.udp I'll try to go 
check on this later today, and will report back if its stable at all.

Pretty impressive though that my g4 1.5ghz could handle all that. All 
this would probably work better on an intel system though?

- Ben

> I've been trying to get oddcast to work the past couple days, but keep 
> running into this problem
> 
> ringbuffer full, tried to write 4096, but wrote 0
> 
> its usually in response to something distracting the processor for a 
> second, like dragging a window across the screen. Have tried on a 1.5ghz 
> ppc processor and 700mhz pIII and problem persists. Have searched for 
> other users reporting similar problems, and found one hint on the 
> oddsock site
> 
> .... but unfortunately their site is in a period of transition, plug 
> above line into google and you'll find a couple similar complaints. 
> Apparently, the code for oddsock was scrapped from ices2-jack, which 
> would explain why I have no problems when trying to do this with Ogg, 
> but maybe Ogg is less processor intensive? I'm only having problems when 
> trying to encode with LAME.
> 
> If anybody has any ideas, I would love to get this working for our radio 
> station. But if not oddcast, does anybody know if there is any other gnu 
> mp3 encoders out there (darkice?) that are jack compatible. Seems like 
> the darkice guy has been working on livesupport, which I can't wait to 
> see in action.
> 
> - Ben Racher
>