Icecast on linux using AAC

Question

I'm pretty new to using Icecast. We are streaming MP3s from a Linux box with Icecast, but we need to move to AAC. How can I make Icecast stream AAC files?

Answer 1

Iceacast doe not natively support AAC:

Icecast is a streaming media server which currently supports Ogg (Vorbis and Theora), Opus, WebM and MP3 audio streams.^Icecast

To overcome this we may want to have a look at darkice which claims to be capable to convert and send AAC-streams (amongst others) to Icecast.

Also see:

• How do I setup an Icecast server for broadcasting audio in my network?
• Manpage for darkice.cfg

Answer 2

Icecast does not officially support AAC, but if you send it an AAC or MP3 stream it will usually work. We don't support it officially due to patent concerns. For this reason we pass unsupported streams through without any handling.

The challenge is to find a good AAC encoder. FAAC works but is rather mediocre. You can probably buy commercial codecs, they would also address the next concern.

AAC is heaviliy patented and you might need to purchase licenses for it, both for encoding and streaming. IANAL, I don't know. Just pointing it out as to be checked.

That all said, there are probably a few source clients that would support AAC (if compiled from source, etc). I can name libav (avconv), VLC and liquidsoap in addition to the already mentioned darkice.