Ices: Centova Cast Edition

Ices - Centova Cast Edition (ices-cc) is a slightly modified version of the official ices 0.4 streaming source application maintained by Brendan Cully. We've taken the latest CVS snapshot, packaged it up, renamed it to avoid confusion with the official release, and made it easily installable on a number of Linux-based operating systems.

Note that you do not need to be a Centova Cast licensee to use this ices build -- it is freely available for anyone to use under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

New Functionality

The magic in ices-cc is in its new shell-script playlist capability upon which Centova Cast relies for a number of its impressive new dynamic playlist scheduling features.

We've also made a number of additions of our own to ices-cc as well. The full list of new functionality compared to the stable 0.4 release includes:

  • Dynamic shell-scripted playlists (from ices CVS head)
  • Unicode ID3 tags (without which song titles show as "garbage")
  • MinCrossfade setting which can disable crossfading for very short tracks
  • Crossfading tracks at 100% volume (contributed by Daniel Pettersson and Rolf Johansson)
  • Imposing playback time limits for songs
  • Various minor bug fixes

Feature Comparison

We are often asked why we recommend ices-cc (and Liquidsoap, for which we later introduced support in Centova Cast ) over sc_trans and other streaming source applications. The following chart compares the features in similar source software:

Liquidsoap ices-cc ices0 ices2 sctrans1 sctrans2 ezstream
Supports ShoutCast DNAS Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes No
Supports IceCast Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes
Supports MP3 Streams Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes
Supports AAC Streams Yes No No No No Yes No
Supports Ogg Streams Yes No No Yes No No Yes
Supports ID3 tags (song titles) Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes
Supports streaming without re-encoding No Yes Yes No No No Yes
Supports dynamic shell script playlists Yes Yes No Yes No Yes Yes

ices-cc and Liquidsoap are the only streaming sources that support both ShoutCast and IceCast servers while featuring dynamic playlist support -- a critical feature for Centova Cast. (If IceCast support is not required, sc_trans v2 works well with Centova Cast also, however it is no longer being supported nor maintained by its authors.)

Technical Support / Credits

Please note that Centova Technologies Inc. distributes this edition of ices as a convenience to its clients only. ices is neither owned nor maintained by Centova Technologies, and thus we are regrettably unable to provide any technical support or assistance with regard to its installation or use, nor are we able to extend any kind of warranties or guarantees with regard to ices or ices-cc.

ices-cc is little more than a renamed and conveniently-packaged version of ices 0.4-CVS, with a few patches of our own added in to make it more usable. We take no credit for the great deal of hard work that has been put into it. ices is the product of a number of developers including Alexander Havang, Chad Armstrong, Mark Taylor, Erik Greenwald, and Brendan Cully, each of whom are copyright owners for their respective code contributions. ices is currently maintained by Brendan Cully.

Download

We offer both an ices-cc source tarball and a shell script which will automatically build ices-cc and all of its dependencies from source with no user intervention.

Version Date Size Download
Source tarball 0.4.2 08/16/2012 400KB Download
Automatic installer (shell script) 1.1.4 08/25/2018 4KB Download

License

ices-cc is released under the GNU General Public License. The full license terms are included in the file named COPYING included with the software.

Ices Official Release

The official release of ices0 is available from:

ices0 home page: http://icecast.org/ices.php
ices0 CVS web interface: http://svn.xiph.org/icecast/trunk/ices0/
ices0 mailing list: http://lists.xiph.org/pipermail/icecast/

ices-cc is based on an ices 0.4 CVS snapshot from 2007-04-08 (which, at the time of this writing, is equivalent to the current ices CVS head).