Icecast - Aug 2006 - using mulitple sound card inputs

I got 2 cards working, and will need to add another 2 cards shortly.  I
hadn't thought about the matter-it's something I can try to play with
later.  What you've done here is awesome, where did you come across a
system that could house 11 pci cards?


______________________________________________
Andrew Wehner
Chatham Financial - Kennett Square
T: 484.731.0029



-----Original Message-----
From: telmnstr@757.org [mailto:telmnstr@757.org] 
Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2006 12:13 AM
To: Andrew Wehner
Cc: icecast@xiph.org
Subject: Re: [Icecast] using mulitple sound card inputs


> I've been able to successfully stream using Icecast with Darkice on my
> Debian box.  I want to be able to stream multiple live streams from 
> the same box using different sound cards (Basically, we have groups 
> that will be using different TV channels and want to be able to stream
> the audio to the user's pc's for the proper channels they are 
> viewing).  Has anyone tried to do this?
> Thanks,
> Andrew
Yup! I've gotten 7 feeds from a single host. I had 11 PCI sound cards in
the machine (FreeBSD w/ Darkice feeding Icecast). After 7 though, it got
a bit shaky.

I used a Creative Labs sound card that I specifically hunted down that
did not feature the MIDI port (The game port).

Photos of the host (I built two of them, each with 6 inputs):
http://users.757.org/~ethan/pics/geek/computer_stuff/soundcard_champion/

In this day and age, I would look at the Creative Labs USB sound
devices. 
There is an older one that can be had for $15-20 each. The thing I'm not
sure is upon system reboot, with those devices connected to USB hubs,
will they order themselves the same? This is important or else audio
inputs will end up on the wrong mountpoints.

 				- Ethan

> I got 2 cards working, and will need to add another 2 cards shortly.  I
> hadn't thought about the matter-it's something I can try to play
with
> later.  What you've done here is awesome, where did you come across a
> system that could house 11 pci cards?
Sure! I got them from eBay for around $120 each. They are 4u rackmount 
industrial systems that use a backplane. The actual motherboard conforms 
to a specification called PICMG. If you search eBay for it, you will find 
CPU cards that contain various processors, and backplanes. The actual 
backplane contains PCI controllers, because PCI can only have 5 slots per 
bus.

Man are used in telcom setups, industrial automation, and what not. The 
ones I found had 19 PCI slots, and perhaps 2 ISA.

 				- Ethan