Finally, what about the Web-based administration module I was touting so proudly earlier? Well, I wasn't lying -- the icecast server comes with built-in support for Web-based administration of the server, allowing you to use a Web browser to view source client and listener statistics, kick source clients and/or listeners off the server and manipulate mountpoints. As of this writing, this module is fairly basic, but expect it to improve over time (or why wait? just roll your own admin module, it's pretty easy!)

In order to access the Web administration module, start up your browser and point it to the hostname of your icecast server. For example, if your server is named "olympus.local.net" and is running on port 8000, you can access the Web based administration module by browsing to this URL:

http://olympus.local.net:8000/admin/

At this point, you'll be asked for a user name and password. Enter the values you specified oh-so-long-ago in the icecast configuration file,

Go ahead and play with it -- you're not likely to break anything serious!

If you're looking for tools to interface with the icecast server, either to manage playlists or control server variables, there are a number of free, open-source applications available to help you in this endeavour. Here's a list of the best ones:

Tunez, at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tunez/

DarkIce, at http://darkice.sourceforge.net/

Sphinxter, at
http://freshmeat.net/redir/sphinxter/37244/url_homepage/sphinxter

Muse, at
http://freshmeat.net/redir/musemp3streamer/6830/url_homepage/muse.html

Also take a look at these links, for more information on Icecast:

The official Icecast Web site, at http://www.icecast.org/

The Icecast FAQ, at http://www.icecast.org/faq.html

The Icecast manual, at http://www.icecast.org/documentation.html

The Icecast mailing lists, at http://www.xiph.org/icecast/list.html

Older Icecast releases, at http://www.icecast.org/releases/

And with that, I'm outta here. I hope you enjoy your Icecast experience, and that you have as much fun with it as I did writing this tutorial. Until next time...keep smiling!

NOTE Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no warranties or support for the source code described in this article.