I’ve been using Traktor DJ Studio 3 a for over a year now and it is an amazing program for digital DJing. One interesting feature in Traktor is the ability to broadcast audio to a streaming server using Icecast. Icecast is an open source streaming media server that runs on Windows and Linux. Traktor has an Icecast client built in that allows you to send an audio stream as Ogg Vorbis to an Icecast server. Ogg Vorbis is an open source audio codec that is said to be superior to MP3 in sound quality and is also license free.

It took some trial and error to get this working, but ultimately I installed the Windows version of Icecast server and used the Icecast client built into Traktor on a Mac. I have a Windows XP system running Icecast server to broadcast to the internet and a MacBook Pro sending the stream from Traktor to the PC over my local network. I hardest part was setting Traktor to broadcast. I found a button shaped like an antenna in Traktor’s audio recording section that lights solid red when pressed. This indicates that the connection is active and communicating with the server. If it blinks there is a problem with the configuration in Traktor’s broadcast preferences.

Several applications will play Ogg streams and I tested both Quicktime and Winamp successfully. Unfortunately iTunes will not play an Ogg stream. The positive side of this is that anyone who has iTunes should have Quicktime, so potential listeners likely already have software that can play the stream.

If you’re looking for an easy route to broadcast Rogue Amoeba’s Nicecast is simple, inexpensive and easy to setup. This was a great experiment for me and I really enjoyed putting all of the pieces together to get it to work. My next step is to stream a DJ set into the popular MMORPG Second Life via Icecast. Stay Tuned.