Enabling Relaying Under Icecast1

Relaying was a common feature on older icecast versions. I use it often to take the load off older icecast machines. Under icecast1 relaying is fairly simple to setup and manage.

Relaying streams allows you to minimize bandwidth on one network and distribute it across many networks. That means that one simple cable modem connection, if distributed among many other servers on different networks, can be broadcasted on over 1000 streams. It's all a matter of bandwidth.

The option does not necessarily work under the liveice configuration nor within the icecast.conf file. Rather than setting up the relay server to start piping information to another server automatically, you must manually set the relay server under the icecast command line. That means that you must first start up the icecast server and then under that command line set the relay options.

By relay options, I mean you should set the server to either push or pull the stream. Here is one possible example.

If I were broadcasting a live stream on server icecast.ksl.com and wanted server quasi.ksl.com to carry that same stream and redistribute the MP3 audio, I would log into the command line of the icecast server quasi.ksl.com as it is running icecast and then type the following:

# relay pull http://icecast.ksl.com:8000/

You can do the same on icecast.ksl.com and simply replace the "pull" option with "push". This would then feed the stream out to the relay server. This would help to optimize bandwidth should it be on another system or network.