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Icecast

If you want to play the audio on another computer than the one running Mopidy, you can stream the audio from Mopidy through an Icecast audio streaming server. Multiple media players can then be connected to the streaming server simultaneously. To use the Icecast output, do the following:

Warning

The last known working version of libshout3 is v2.4.1, this is the version available in Debian Buster. Newer versions of this library, such as those found in Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian Bullseye are bugged and render GStreamer's shout2send sink broken and unusable. You cannot stream from Mopidy via Icecast with the below method when using Ubuntu 20.04 or Debian Bullseye. Consider Snapcast as an alternative solution.

  1. Install, configure and start the Icecast server. It can be found in the icecast2 package in Debian/Ubuntu.

  2. Set the audio/output config value to encode the output audio to MP3 (lamemp3enc) or Ogg Vorbis (audioresample ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux) and send it to Icecast (shout2send).

    You might also need to change the shout2send default settings, run gst-inspect-1.0 shout2send to see the available settings. Most likely you want to change ip, username, password, and mount.

    Example for MP3 streaming:

    ini title="mopidy.conf" [audio] output = lamemp3enc ! shout2send async=false mount=mopidy ip=127.0.0.1 port=8000 password=hackme

    Example for Ogg Vorbis streaming:

    ini title="mopidy.conf" [audio] output = audioresample ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! oggmux ! shout2send async=false mount=mopidy ip=127.0.0.1 port=8000 password=hackme

    Example for MP3 streaming and local audio (multiple outputs):

    ini title="mopidy.conf" [audio] output = tee name=t ! queue ! audioresample ! autoaudiosink t. ! queue ! lamemp3enc ! shout2send async=false mount=mopidy ip=127.0.0.1 port=8000 password=hackme

Other advanced setups are also possible for outputs. Basically, anything you can use with the gst-launch-1.0 command can be plugged into audio/output.

Known issues

  • Previous/next: The stream ends on previous and next. See #1306 for details. This can be worked around using a fallback stream, as described below.

  • Pause: Pausing playback stops the stream. This is probably not something we're going to fix. This can be worked around using a fallback stream, as described below.

  • Metadata: Track metadata might be missing from the stream. For Spotify, this should mostly work as of Mopidy 2.0.1. For other extensions, #866 is the tracking issue.

Fallback stream

By using a fallback stream playing silence, you can somewhat mitigate the known issues above.

Example Icecast configuration:

icecast.xml
<mount>
  <mount-name>/mopidy</mount-name>
  <fallback-mount>/silence.mp3</fallback-mount>
  <fallback-override>1</fallback-override>
</mount>

You can easily find MP3 files with just silence by searching the web. The silence.mp3 file needs to be placed in the directory defined by <webroot>...</webroot> in the Icecast configuration.