Update: The team has published a more detailed piece on broadcasting from the Mac without Nicecast.
Rogue Amoeba, the makers of useful sound utilities for the Mac, will no longer be making one of their apps as Nicecast has officially been discontinued. Nicecast allows Mac users to broadcast audio from their machine over the Internet — originally intended for Internet radio — and is still used by podcasters today to create live streams.
Rogue Amoeba has already pulled the utility from sale and says no future updates are planned. Nicecast should still run on macOS 10.10 through the current macOS 10.13 version through the end of this year.
As a 32-bit app, it’s likely Nicecast will eventually stop working on future versions of macOS as Apple pushes developers to adopt 64-bit support before it drops 32-bit app support entirely (like on iOS 11 and later).
With Nicecast still being used by some customers today, Rogue Amoeba points to alternative solutions available now before Nicecast stops working in future macOS versions:
To run a local streaming server on your Mac, installation of the command-line icecast is possible using Homebrew or MacPorts.
Feeding audio into any streaming server, local or remote, is possible with several different tools. The icecast website maintains a useful list of third party apps, with Mac tools like broadcast using this tool (aka “butt”) and Ladiocast being of special note. It’s also worth pointing out that our audio routing tool Loopback will enable you to feed any audio from your Mac into these tools for broadcasting.
Rogue Amoeba wraps up its announcement by acknowledging that the utility is still in use today by podcasters while teasing out the possibility of someday shipping a new utility designed specifically for that use case.
In particular, we know many podcasters provide a live stream using Nicecast. We hope to eventually provide a more comprehensive solution for that use case. Following this blog is the best way to stay up to date with our latest news.
Check out the full announcement here for more details. For more from Rogue Amoeba, try their new soundboard utility Farrago for Mac which recently launched.
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