Seems the default answer is icecast + darkice but many people mention a delay of anywhere from 1-5 seconds. Is this due to hardware limitations?
1 Answer
Icecast is not the answer. It is not designed for very low latency. You can trim the delays down to below 1 second, but it's not consistent across multiple clients. So if you have more than one player connected they will start drifting apart. For use cases like you imply them a constant (sometimes even adjustable) sub 100ms latency is key.
An approach more likely to succeed is VoIP software or network transparent audio servers like Jack or PulseAudio.
2
