Introduction

Table of Contents

Overview

Rocket Streaming Audio Server (RSAS) is a webserver designed for serving live streaming audio. It allows you to connect and broadcast live audio to listeners over the web, using a streaming audio encoder, such as Rocket Broadcaster.

It is designed for professional use, and can scale to 1 million concurrent listeners on a single server.

Rocket Streaming Audio Server is also designed to be an easy drop-in replacement for Icecast, and an alternative to SHOUTcast. It works with all Icecast-compatible streaming audio encoders, and all HTTP stream players.

Read more about migrating from Icecast or migrating from SHOUTcast.

Motivation

Over the years, we and many of our customers have discovered bugs or other undocumented deficiencies in both Icecast and SHOUTcast, and we wanted to build something better that fixes all these issues. We also wanted to make integration easier for streaming platforms and web developers. Lastly, we wanted to build modern streaming features that are better aligned with the needs of broadcasters in the 21st century.

In the process of creating the Radio Mast Streaming Network, we used our stream monitoring to discover several stability issues and broken features in Icecast. As the old saying goes, "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself", so we took it upon ourselves to build the Rocket Streaming Audio Server to power Radio Mast's global audio CDN, which has been rock solid ever since. We're excited to now share this great technology with the wider internet radio community.

Key Features

  • Stream MP3, AAC, HE-AAC v1, HE-AAC v2 (AAC+), Ogg Vorbis, Opus, and Ogg FLAC over HTTP to listeners.
  • Designed as drop-in replacement for Icecast
  • Lower-latency streaming out-of-the-box than Icecast or SHOUTcast
  • HLS support - Easily convert your existing Icecast streams to HLS on-the-fly.
  • Browser-friendly streaming metadata - Easily get live metadata in JavaScript (via HTML5 Server-Sent Events).
  • High performance - low CPU and memory usage
  • Multithreaded - optimized for modern multi-core systems and high throughput.
  • TLS (HTTPS) 1.2 and 1.3 - including support for multiple certs (vhosts / SNI).
  • Stream relaying (stream mirroring)
  • Stream fallbacks
  • Fallback Files / Looped Audio File Serving
  • Static file serving
  • Ogg FLAC metadata support
  • icy-metadata, with low latency
  • Low-latency stream relaying
  • CORS out-of-the-box
  • Compatible with Icecast source clients, including Rocket Broadcaster, SAM Broadcaster, RadioDJ, and many more.
  • Icecast-compatible access.log and playlist.log (track performances)
  • Binding to multiple ports / IPs (multiple listen sockets)
  • Compatible with reverse proxies, such as haproxy or nginx.

Supported Platforms

RSAS is available for Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD (experimental).

The following Windows version are supported:

  • Windows 7, 8, 8.1
  • Windows 10
  • Windows 11 and newer
  • 32-bit Windows is not supported. 64-bit is required.

For Linux, a Linux distribution with glibc 2.27 or greater is required.

Packages are provided for Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, and more. Please visit the Download page for the list of supported Linux distributions.

Installation

Please see the section on Installation.

Source Code Availability

Rocket Streaming Audio Server is built from scratch in C++, and is not based on any other existing software. Source code access and licensing options are available for enterprise customers who wish to modify it. Please contact sales for more information.

Support

Questions? Please contact support.