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Thursday, 1 February 2007

mac shoutcasting.. the saga continues! (techie!)

techy stuff
Having drawn something of a blank - despite Jon's fine efforts - with persuading MuSE to behave as I'd like it, I spent much of last night looking for alternatives.

For such a trivial thing as getting the "icy-icq" messages to work, I didn't think it was worth spending $40 on Nicecast, and although Audion is (now) free, it can only stream an MP3 playlist. I couldn't get MacAmp Lite to work, either (what is it about Mac software being abandoned?)

Looking through some discussion boards, I discovered that my best option may be DarkIce, although once again, its documentation is horrifically limited, and it gave me - yet another - late night of struggling!

Fortunately, though, there were some resources to help me (from http://lists.dyne.org/muse/msg00849.php):

To get Darkice to work on Mac OS X, I installed the Apple Developer Tools (which gives you gcc). I also installed fink (http://fink.sf.net) which is a ports and package install system for OS X.

I installed the following packages:

• libvorbis0
• libvorbis0-shlibs
• libogg
• libogg-shlibs
• lame
• lame-shlibs
• lame-dev

I am using a pre-compiled version of Jack from http://www.jackosx.com, which comes with a nice GUI for starting the Jack audio router. But command line version from http://jack.sf.net compiles from source fine too.

Then to compile darkice (/sw is finks install directory):

./configure --with-lame-prefix=/sw --with-vorbis-prefix=/sw --with-jack --without-alsa

It would be nice to have Jack and Darkice as Fink packages, I will look into it.

So, I downloaded and installed the rather marvellous Jack, although I had to add this:
 export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/sw:/usr/local:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
to my .profile, so it could find the "jack.pc" package when had been installed. Then I was able to run the "./configure" line above without any further problems.

But.. it all went wrong again. There was a rather nasty error when trying to compile it using make
 DarkIce build error on OS X: Util.cpp:263: error: floating constant exceeds range of 'double'

Fortunaetly, once again, help was at hand at http://www.archivesat.com/DarkIce_live_audio_streamer/thread1824620.htm

Essentially, on line 263 of src/Util.cpp, there's:
if ( s == str || val == HUGE_VAL ) {
The OS X implementation of linux doesn't have that as a constant, so it advises that it is changed to:
if ( s == str || val == LONG_MAX ) {

Finally it worked, although I had to wrestle even to get the man page to display, so I could see what the darkice.cfg configuration file needed to look like. To achieve this, I cheated, and did:

cp /usr/local/man/man5/* /usr/local/share/man/man5

And we had a winner! Finally.. after several hours of struggling, I got it working. There's a very important bit about aggregrating the soundcard ports in the Jack manual, so if you've got a Mac Mini, and have come across this blog entry in the same harassed state as I was last night, I would definitely recommend you take a look.

radio bit
http://www.future-of-radio.co.uk : interesting advert for a new enhancement to radio listening... slideshows as you listen. Reckon it'll catch on? (Or just be mostly adverts?)

Posted by james at February 1, 2007 12:13 PM

Comments

Posted by: jon von bird at February 2, 2007 8:41 PM

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