Rocket Streaming Blog

Streaming Audio News and Tips


Articles by Albert S.

Rocket Broadcaster Logo Rocket Broadcaster 1.4 Released

Screenshot of the Broadcast Audio Processor in Rocket Broadcaster Pro

We're pleased to announce the release of Rocket Broadcaster 1.4. This major update adds the brand new Broadcast Audio Processor, an automatic configuration backup system, and improved connectivity for Radio Mast.

Here's what's new in Rocket Broadcaster 1.4.0:

Broadcast Audio Processor PRO

Our brand new Broadcast Audio Processor improves the sound of your stream by providing consistent loudness and mastering of your audio. By using ITU BS.1770 loudness metering (LUFS), our unique hybrid two-stage AGC ensures your stream hits a consistent loudness target, so listeners can hear it comfortably on all devices.

The Broadcast Audio Processor also includes a Multiband Compressor and Peak Limiter, with 9 easy presets, to help you shape the sound of your radio station. Our signal processing chain gives your stream that "radio" sound, making it loud and clear on a variety of devices.

For more information, check out our page on the Broadcast Audio Processor and the documentation for it.

Upgrading to Rocket Broadcaster Pro 1.4? Watch our 2-minute crash course on the new Broadcast Audio Processor:

Other New Features

Soundcard Clock Drift Compensation

When using different input and output devices, Rocket Broadcaster now transparently compensates for clock sync drift. This solves an issue where mixing different input and output devices could sometimes result in a choppy stream over long periods of time.

Enhanced Connectivity for Radio Mast

We've added a new "Radio Mast" stream connection type, which provides better connectivity to Radio Mast servers. It will automatically choose the closest server region for you and failover to the next nearest region if your ISP loses the ability to reach it.

Automatic Config Backup System

We've added a system to automatically save a backup of your settings on your PC, to help prevent losing your settings if your PC is shutdown improperly or your settings are corrupted. If your settings are corrupted and a backup is available, you'll be asked if you'd like to restore from backup. This prompt is on a timer which automatically accepts the backup option after 45 seconds, to help ensure operation is automatically restored without human intervention.

Other New Features:

  • Stream Diagnostic - We've improved the explanations of some common issues in the Stream Diagnostics.
  • More keyboard shortcuts - Added keyboard shortcuts for mute mic (CTRL+M), opening the Broadcast Processor (CTRL+B), and monitoring master output (CTRL+O).

Bugfixes

  • Fixed a rare crash that could happen on certain systems over long periods of time.
  • Fixed a rare issue that could cause settings to get lost during unexpected shutdown.

Download the Update

RSAS Logo RSAS 1.0.5 Released

We're pleased to announce the release of RSAS 1.0.5. Rocket Streaming Audio Server (RSAS) is a high-performance webserver for distributing live streaming audio through the web, optimized for low latency and high numbers of simultaneous listeners.

This new release is a recommended update for all users.

Download RSAS 1.0.5 today from our Downloads page.

Looped Audio Files

We've redesigned the Looped Audio Files feature (aka fallback files) to solve some long-standing issues, allowing them to now be much more useful as fallbacks. Fallback files no longer rely on client-side buffering to throttle playback, which improves compatibility with players and prevents delay from accumulating. Looped Audio File sources now start automatically too, which makes them more usable as fallbacks in practice.

When connected to a Looped Audio File mount, listeners will now all hear the same audio from a common playback position. Previously, each listener would hear the audio starting from the beginning of the file. We acknowledge this change in behaviour may not be ideal for all broadcasters, but in order to implement the other usability improvements mentioned above, we had to make a tradeoff, and this was a result of that.

HLS Improvements

HLS playlists now include the EXT-X-PROGRAM-DATE-TIME, which helps players do timeshifting over long periods of itme.

Dependencies and Build Overhaul

We've performed a major upgrade of our build system as part of ongoing maintenance necessary to keep RSAS production-ready, secure, and supported on as many platforms as possible. RSAS has been upgraded to use OpenSSL 3.1 and is now statically linked against it, to allow us to continue supporting older Linux distributions for longer. These build system changes also recently allowed us to respond quickly to security concerns over liblzma and audit our use of it.

Speaking of builds, we've added support for Ubuntu 24.04, which is the new Ubuntu LTS release slated for April 25th.

Other Changes

For a full list of changes including bugfixes, please refer to the CHANGELOG.

RSAS Logo RSAS is not affected by the XZ Utils / liblzma backdoor (CVE-2024-3094)

On March 30th, 2024, the discovery of an backdoor in XZ Utils / liblzma specifically targeting the SSH process was announced and assigned CVE-2024-3094. RSAS is unaffected by the scope of the security issue known to date. We investigated this vulnerability because some versions of RSAS depended on liblzma, but not on any version known to be backdoored.

We will update this post and notify our mailing list if the status changes.

For more details, please read our mailing list announcement.

Rocket Broadcaster Logo Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.43 Released

We're pleased to announce the release of Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.43. This is a minor maintenance release that mainly brings a couple of bugfixes.

Here's what's new in Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.43:

  • Audio Input volume control now saves across restarts
  • System Audio Capture can now be disabled in the Preferences dialog.
  • Improved compatibility with high DPI displays and display scaling. Rendering is greatly improved on 4K displays with display scaling.
  • Improved the way soundcards are enumerated, to improve device compatibility and fix some bugs:
  • Fixed a bug causing some MME sound devices to open in mono.
  • Fixed some inconsistencies with devices that differed in capabilities depending on the selected Audio API.
  • Fixed a bug causing the Broadcast Wizard settings to not apply.

Download the Update

RSAS Logo RSAS 1.0.4 Released

We're pleased to announce the release of RSAS 1.0.4. Rocket Streaming Audio Server (RSAS) is a high-performance webserver for distributing live streaming audio through the web, optimized for low latency and high numbers of simultaneous listeners.

This release is primarily a bugfix release, but there are a few minor new features as well. This version is a recommended update for all HLS users.

Download RSAS 1.0.4 today from our Downloads page.

What's new in RSAS 1.0.4?

Codec Detection

RSAS now detects the codec used by each stream and includes this information in the /health API. Having this information available at a glance is useful for troubleshooting and validation.

HLS Customization

You can now customize the HLS segment size and number of segments in a playlist, which allows broadcasters to make their streams rewindable further into the past. For more information, see HLS Settings.

Custom HTTP Headers

Custom HTTP headers can now be added to all responses, or scoped by port, VHost, or mount. This feature makes RSAS more flexible and eliminates the need to put a reverse proxy in front of it in many enterprise environments.

For more information, see our docs on Custom HTTP Headers.

Proxy Server Support

RSAS can now use a proxy server for outbound HTTP requests, which is useful in corporate environments. Read more about proxy server support in RSAS.

Other Changes

For a full list of changes including bugfixes, please refer to the CHANGELOG.

What's next?

We are still finalizing our roadmap for the next major release and are not yet ready to announce details on features.

What we can share is that we will be overhauling our build system and are hoping to see some performance improvements and support for new platforms (Raspberry Pi). We will also be upgrading to OpenSSL 3, as OpenSSL 1.1.1 is EOL. In order to continue supporting RSAS on older platforms like CentOS 7, which do not have OpenSSL 3, we will be switching to statically linking all dependencies, including OpenSSL. As a consequence, it will be even more important for you to stay appraised of RSAS releases in case there's another Heartbleed-style situation, so please make sure to join our low-traffic rsas-announce mailing list if you are running RSAS on the public internet.

Rocket Broadcaster Logo Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.42 Released

We're pleased to announce the release of Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.42, which includes a number of small bugfixes and minor features.

Here's what's new in Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.42:

  • Added support for new metadata formats:
    • AudioVault AVAir
    • Westwood One Storq
    • Arrakis New Wave Format 5
  • Show a low disk space warning in the Preferences dialog if there is insufficient space for recordings.
  • Fixed a rare issue where dozens of consecutive automated reboots could eventually cause the application to fail to launch on startup.
  • Fixed a compatibility issue with screen readers (bug introduced in version 1.3.39)
  • Fixed an issue caused by attempting to record with less than 30% disk space free

Introducing HLS at Radio Mast

We're also pleased to announce HLS support for MP3 and AAC streams is now available as a free upgrade for all users on the Radio Mast Streaming Network. HLS provides a better listening experience for mobile listeners by allowing listeners to seamlessly switch between Wifi and cellular networks interrupting playback, as well as improving battery life.

Getting an HLS audio stream is now easier than ever before - simply create a stream on Radio Mast and connect your encoder. Your MP3 or AAC stream will be available not only as a conventional HTTP(S) stream, but now also as an HLS stream. No reconfiguration or expensive extra software is required, and this feature is available at no additional cost to Radio Mast users.

Learn more about HLS at Radio Mast on our blog.

New to HLS? Check out our quick primer, "What is HLS for Audio?"

Download the Update

Feedback

Rocket Broadcaster development is driven by your feedback, and all of the changes above were made as the result of feedback from users. If you're looking for a missing feature, or have ideas for how we can make Rocket Broadcaster even better, please let us know!

RSAS Logo RSAS 1.0.3 and Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.37 Released

We're pleased to announce the release of RSAS 1.0.3 and Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.37! Rocket Streaming Audio Server (RSAS) is a high-performance webserver for distributing live streaming audio through the web, with low latency and high listener capacity. Rocket Broadcaster is a streaming audio encoder for capturing live audio and sending it to a high capacity server, such as RSAS, for distribution to listeners.

RSAS 1.0.3

RSAS 1.0.3 is primarily a bugfix release that includes a fix for HLS on Windows and a rare issue that could cause source connections to get stuck on Linux.

Get RSAS 1.0.3 today from our downloads page.

Changes include:

  • Webhook source auth: Added http_status field, which passes through the original request's full status line.
  • Webhook source and listener auth: Pass through client HTTP headers as HTTP headers (with the header_prefix), in addition to POST body params (backwards compatible). Read more about this change in the webhook authentication docs.
  • Bugfix: Persistent relays could in certain situations not kick relaying listeners when failing, preventing downstream failover.
  • Bugfix: Fixed rare issue causing read timeout mechanism to fail, leading to stuck source connections or webhooks.
  • Bugfix: Fixed compatibility with older FLAC encoders
  • Bugfix: Fixed preroll truncation on Linux and force audio frame sync after preroll.
  • Bugfix: Windows GUI: Fixed hostname setting not saving (HLS)
  • Bugfix: Windows GUI: Fixed empty max-listener-duration causing error on startup.

Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.37

Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.37 is a cumulative update that contains important bugfixes for Radio Mast users along with some minor features.

Changes include:

  • Added CPU usage monitor for encoders linked to Radio Mast.
  • Added support for Smarts Broadcast Skylla metadata format
  • Added support for "Hyphen Delimited" metadata format.
  • Added "%ignore%" token for Window Title metadata capture, to allow ignoring certain parts of a window title.
  • Network optimizations
  • Fixed rare instability caused by the "Link to Radio Mast" feature.

Rocket Broadcaster Pro customers can download the latest version by logging into the Oscillicious Shop and clicking "My Products".

Free Edition users can download Rocket Broadcaster here.

RSAS Logo RSAS 1.0 Released

RSAS 1.0 Banner - Rocket Streaming Audio Server Logo.

After more than a year of development, we're pleased to announce RSAS 1.0 is now available! First released 3 years ago, Rocket Streaming Audio Server (RSAS) is a high-performance webserver designed for delivering live streaming audio through the web, with low latency and high listener capacity.

This major milestone has something for all our users and delivers on our vision of creating an Icecast-compatible streaming server that brings live audio broadcasting into the 21st century. RSAS 1.0 offers exciting new features and higher performance than ever before. Each new feature has been designed with usability in mind, while continuing to offer the unmatched high performance we strive for.

Today, RSAS powers live streaming audio for thousands of radio stations, major sports teams, governments, national public broadcasters, emergency services, telecom operators, and our Radio Mast CDN.

➡️Get RSAS 1.0 now from our downloads page.

Upgrading on Linux? Please read our instructions on upgrading to 1.0.

We owe our amazing user community a big thank you for your feedback, feature suggestions, and bug reports that have helped shape RSAS. Special thanks to our partners at G&L Geißendörfer & Leschinsky and Andy Steven at North Broadcast for going the extra mile with bug reporting and testing.


What's new in RSAS 1.0?

HLS Audio

HLS is a modern streaming protocol designed for better reliability and lower battery usage on mobile devices. Until now, HLS for live streaming audio faced limited adoption by radio broadcasters due to a lack of support from encoders and streaming servers, as it remains unsupported by Icecast and SHOUTcast. HLS audio stacks in the wild often consist of ad-hoc shell scripts, obscure FFMPEG commands, and various webservers glued together which lack the robustness and observability expected by broadcast engineers.

We are excited to announce that RSAS now supports HLS for live audio, and provides broadcasters with an easy migration path to adopt HLS for more reliable streaming to mobile devices.

RSAS transmuxes your existing MP3 and AAC streams into HLS (without re-encoding), so no changes to your existing encoder setup are needed and effectively making HLS audio encoders obsolete. Additionally, HLS listeners are included in the listener statistics provided by /health and HLS listener sessions are reported in the access.log just like traditional HTTP streaming listeners, for compatibility with your existing listener statistics processing setup. This design allows broadcasters to easily adopt HLS without changes to your encoder or listener statistics setup. RSAS provides a tightly integrated HLS live audio solution that provides the benefits of HLS without the costs of rearchitecting your live streaming.

Some of the HLS features included in this release are:

  • Converting existing MP3 and HLS streams to HLS - just enable HLS and then add /hls.m3u8 to the end of your stream URL
  • ID3 metadata for HLS
  • Integration with /health listener counts and access.log listener session logging.
  • Relaying HLS streams from other RSAS instances (with intelligent caching)

To get started with HLS, head over to our HLS documentation.

Ad Insertion - Preroll, Midroll, and Postroll

RSAS now has the ability to play a preroll audio clip to for listeners when they connect, before playing your live audio. For convenience, your preroll can be specified as a URL to a remote audio file, which is downloaded and cached by RSAS. This powerful feature allows your preroll to be updated dynamically and saves you the hassle of distributing preroll audio files to multiple servers.

Preroll ads can also be dynamically customized on a per-listener basis via the Listener Authentication Webhook.

Midroll support allows you to insert audio clips (ads, jingles, etc.) in the middle of your stream. Ad breaks are triggerable via metadata from your encoder or via the Manage API. Midroll support is programmable and requires integration with your own midroll webhook handler, where your handler returns a list of audio files to insert into a stream.

Ad insertion is not yet supported with HLS, but is on the roadmap for a future release.

Visit our documentation on Ad Insertion for more information.

HTTP/1.1 and File Serving Performance Optimizations

RSAS is now an extremely fast webserver for serving static files too.

Since HLS involves serving audio in file-based segments, in order to optimize HLS performance on both the server and client side, we implemented HTTP/1.1 and revamped our static file serving code. RSAS now supports HTTP/1.1 "Keep-Alive" and range requests for seeking in static files such as podcasts or video files. (RSAS can serve MP4 video files with seeking out-of-the-box now!)

Static file serving is now fully asynchronous and is blazing fast.

How fast? On Windows, RSAS beats both nginx and Apache in static file requests per second. On Linux, RSAS beats Apache and ties with nginx in single threaded performance.

Requests per second benchmark comparing RSAS, Apache2, and nginx. RSAS scores the highest RPS.
Single-threaded benchmark serving an 88 KB file with Apache2 2.4.54, nginx 1.22.1, and RSAS 1.0.0. Linux tests performed on Ubuntu 22.04 on a Ryzen 2700X. Windows tests ran on Windows 11 and a Ryzen 5700G.

Overhauled Linux Packages

On Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS, our RSAS packages have been upgraded to install RSAS as a systemd service and run as a separate rsas user. Our Linux static binary and FreeBSD tarballs also now include an installer script.

Upgrading from a pre-1.0 version? Read our upgrading instructions here.

Password Protection for /health

By popular demand, the /health endpoint can now be password protected to prevent enumeration of your streams. We've also introduced mount-specific /<mount>/health endpoints, which can also be password protected.

More Icecast APIs

For better integration with third party Icecast statistics platforms, RSAS now implements several missing Icecast APIs, including:

  • /admin/stats
  • /admin/listclients
  • /admin/listmounts


Use of these APIs requires an <admin-password> to be set in your configuration and enabling the Icecast-compatible status page.

For more information, please see our Icecast APIs documentation.

Release Notes and Mailing List

For the full list of new features and changes, please see the CHANGELOG. RSAS 1.0 includes a number of other smaller features as well as nearly 20 bugfixes.

We've also introduced a new low-traffic mailing list, rsas-announce, for release announcements and security advisories. If you're running RSAS in production, we recommend joining.

📡 Downloads and Getting Started

RSAS 1.0 is available today for Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD. The Free Edition supports up to 100 concurrent listeners.

Upgrade to RSAS Pro to handle up to 1 million concurrent listeners. RSAS Pro licenses are available from our shop.

RSAS for Windows includes a friendly user interface for easy administration and installs as background service.

We recommend taking a quick skim over our documentation after you download RSAS. Linux users will need to create a configuration file and can get started with one of our examples.

What's Next?

We expect a number of small bugfix point releases to roll out over the coming weeks as we receive feedback on the 1.0 release.

The next major features under consideration are ad insertion support for HLS (preroll, midroll, postroll), support for kernel TLS to improve HTTPS performance on modern kernels, and support for other streaming protocols. We'd also like to have RPMs for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux (which may still work with our existing CentOS 8 packages).

📧 Feedback and Feature Suggestions

RSAS 1.0 is the culmination of years of feedback from broadcasters. Your feedback is essential in steering the future of live streaming audio. If you have feedback or feature suggestions, we'd love to hear from you.

RSAS Logo Benchmarking RSAS, Icecast, and SHOUTcast - Round 2

Three years ago, we benchmarked RSAS, Icecast-KH, and SHOUTcast to see how each performed with 10,000 listeners connected. RSAS was shown to be the fastest streaming audio server, with the lowest CPU usage, which is the main bottleneck. With the release of RSAS 1.0, we decided it was time for a new round of benchmarks.

This year, we're going to try ramping up each server to 240,000 listeners and see what happens.

We'll also be trying to improve our benchmarking technique and answer two questions:

1. Which streaming audio server can handle the most listeners?

This question is important for broadcasters because more efficient streaming server software means being able to serve more listeners on the same (or even slower) hardware, leading to cost savings. It is also important to test the maximum capacity of streaming server to check scaling behaviour:

  • Does the streaming server effectively use all available cores?
  • Are there any internal bottlenecks in the streaming server that prevent it from scaling?

This year, we're also testing vanilla Xiph Icecast. Although the "Icecast-KH" fork of Icecast is regarded as having better performance, we wanted to see how Xiph Icecast actually compares.

2. How consistent is the performance of each at high loads?

We've heard from numerous users that Icecast has a listener limit of around 24,000 listeners, after which playback goes choppy. Today, we're going to investigate this and see if we can reproduce it. We're going to push each streaming server to its limit and see what happens.

Test Setup

We've upgraded our test systems since our last benchmarks, so we can try higher listeners counts:

  • Server PC: Ryzen 2700 (8c/16t), 32 GB DDR4 (@ 3200 MHz), Ubuntu 20.04
  • Client PC: Ryzen 5950X (16c/32t), 32 GB DDR4 (@ 3600 MHz), Ubuntu 20.04


Both PCs were directly connected using a pair of Mellanox ConnectX-3 Ethernet cards and a 40 Gbps direct attach copper cable. On the client PC, multiple instances of ab were ramped up and connected via HTTP to the server PC, each simulating 1000 concurrent listeners, until we reached 240,000 or the server's limit. Standard tuning was also applied to each PC to allow them to handle high numbers of network connections (increased socket descriptor limits, etc.).

Listener counts were recorded by polling the status page of each server.

The server PC was configured with the following software:

  • RSAS 1.0.0 pre-release
  • Icecast 2.4.4
  • Icecast-KH 2.4.0-kh15
  • SHOUTcast 2.6.0.753

These are all the latest versions as of August 30th, 2021. A single 64 kbps MP3 relay was configured on each Icecast-compatible server. For Shoutcast, a single 64 kbps MP3 stream was encoded by Rocket Broadcaster using the Shoutcast 1 protocol.

Benchmark Results

CPU Usage vs. Listeners

CPU usage graph: RSAS vs. Icecast and Shoutcast with 240,000 listeners
The average CPU usage of RSAS, Icecast, and SHOUTcast, ramping up to 240,000 listeners connected, sampled over 300 seconds.
Xiph Icecast

Surprisingly, vanilla Xiph Icecast didn't even get off the ground and failed our test immediately. Spinning up 3000 listeners immediately overloaded Icecast, causing it to become unresponsive and freeze. We even slowed down our test to only spin up 100 listeners every 3 seconds, and this too caused it to become overloaded. We were unable to collect data because when our benchmark suite polled the Icecast status page to retrieve the listener count, Icecast was unresponsive.

Since it couldn't run the test, Xiph Icecast is omitted from our graphs and the rest of our analysis.

Icecast-KH
Icecast-KH CPU usage and listeners vs. time, ramping up to 240,000 listeners. Icecast-KH flatlines on CPU usage after 30K listeners
Icecast-KH reaches saturation after about 30K listeners

Icecast-KH seems to fair well for the first 50 seconds of the test, as it ramps up to about 30,000 listeners. However, beyond this point, we see the CPU usage going flat. Icecast-KH is accepting new connections, yet somehow the CPU usage is not increasing. What's going on?

When manually connecting with a player, we can hear the problem - We're able to connect, but Icecast-KH doesn't send us any audio. Despite low CPU usage, once the Icecast reaches this saturation point, listeners are able to connect, but are no longer being served streaming audio. This is problematic because it means your production Icecast server may be failing to serve listeners and hitting an internal bottleneck without you realizing.

We'll see that this theory is confirmed in the bandwidth graph below.

Shoutcast
Shoutcast CPU usage and listeners vs. time, ramping up to 240,000 listeners. Shoutcast flatlines on CPU usage after 20K listeners
Shoutcast reaches saturation after about 20K listeners

Shoutcast fairs similarly to Icecast-KH in this test, but exhibits slightly different behaviour. After about 20,000 listeners, Shoutcast's CPU usage stops increasing indicating the server has reached saturation and the rate at which it can accept new listeners drops. Once it reaches saturation, it is no longer able to keep up with adding new listeners, so by the end of the test, it only reached 60,000 listeners. At saturation, response times increased majorly and new listeners were not able to receive audio.

RSAS
RSAS CPU usage and listeners vs. time, ramping up to 240,000 listeners. RSAS succeeds in reaching 240,000 and CPU usage scales linearly.
RSAS reaches 240,000 listeners!

RSAS is the only streaming server that manages to run this test successfully, accepting and serving audio to 240,000 listeners simultaneously in our test setup. The graph shows what we want to see: CPU usage increasing linearly as listener counts increasing. The spikes are showing the extra work RSAS is doing to accept a batch of 1000 new listeners and are normal behaviour. Above 200,000 we see that the rate at which it accepts new listeners slows down, but it manages to keep up and successfully reaches 240,000 listeners and serves live audio to every listener.

How do we know RSAS was serving audio successfully to each listener?

To help verify this, we measured the bandwidth usage while running these tests, in addition to doing manual testing. Before running each test, we connected as a real listener to ensure the audio was not choppy as the load test ran. We also connected as a new listener at the end of each test, to verify new listeners were still receiving audio.

Bandwidth vs. Listeners

To help interpret the odd CPU usage scaling behaviour and reports of choppy audio with Icecast at saturation, we measured the bandwidth used during each test:

Bandwidth usage graph: RSAS vs. Icecast and Shoutcast with 240,000 listeners

The bandwidth graphs above are consistent with the CPU usage behaviour we noticed earlier and explains why listeners receive choppy audio or no audio with Icecast-KH and Shoutcast after saturation - Those servers simply stop sending audio!

RSAS is the only server that actually manages to serve live streaming audio to 240,000 listeners. We can see that the bandwidth scales up linearly with the listener count, as it should, and that it reaches the expected bandwidth usage for this number of listeners (64 kbps x 240,000 = 15.4 Gbps).

RSAS is able to accomplish this by efficient use of multithreading and optimizations for modern hardware. We optimize RSAS not just for bragging rights, but so that it scales efficiently on your hardware and is easy to monitor in production. Even at 95% CPU usage, RSAS is still able to serve smooth audio to your listeners, whereas Icecast and Shoutcast start having problems at much lower load levels, which make them difficult to monitor and troubleshoot in production.

"Why is my stream choppy?" - Here we showed that the answer can be that your Icecast or Shoutcast server is saturated, despite having low CPU usage.


The Bottom Line

RSAS comes out on top again as the highest performing streaming audio server, allowing broadcasters to serve more listeners than ever before with the same hardware.

Questions about RSAS or planning high capacity streaming audio? Get in touch!

Rocket Broadcaster Logo Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.34 Released

We're pleased to announce the release of Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.34, which includes a number of small bugfixes and minor features. This is a cumulative update and includes changes made since January.

The new features in Rocket Broadcaster 1.3.34 are:

  • Improved reconnection logic, optimized for high reliability platforms like Radio Mast.
  • "Generic INI file" metadata format parser, allowing INI files to be parsed for metadata.
  • Metadata remapper: In the Metadata Processor, there is a new "Advanced" button which can be used to remap metadata fields. This is particularly useful when parsing generic INI files, allowing you to map various key/value pairs onto standard fields like "artist" or "title".


Bugfixes and other tweaks include:

  • Allow @ symbols in Legacy Shoutcast 1 Passwords, and warn about forbidden characters.
  • Fixed a bug where muting a channel could cause distorted audio over time
  • Fixed a recording bug where leftover audio could sometimes be saved when splitting files or toggling recording.
  • Disabled Audio Output (for local monitoring) by default, to reduce likelihood of misconfiguration

Download the Update

Feedback

Rocket Broadcaster development is driven by your feedback, and all of the changes above were made as the result of feedback from users. If you're looking for a missing feature, or have ideas for how we can make Rocket Broadcaster even better, please let us know!

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