I am currently helping out with a student radio station. We broadcast online via shoutcast. Currently we use a piece of software called mAirList, it really is a killer app for us. Unfortunately we're using an old version and it's going to cost us £600 to upgrade to the newest version. Plus we're having loads of other problems with out Windows install, so I'm trying to convice people we can manage a transition to linux without too many problems (not that I have to convince people, I'm head of tech, so I basically just decided we're switching to linux).

However my experience of multimedia under linux is pretty much limmited to amarok to play my personal music collection.

I'm looking for an application that will play music out to our three sound cards simultaneously. We also need a way to automate the playout when the studio is closed, ideally based on a list of criteria (two songs from one list, four from another, play an ident, play ads at a set time, etc.), but the playout is the killer app (I can write scripts for the other stuff).

Broadcast is pretty simple IMO, and has been covered before elsewhere, all I need to do is grab the input from a soundcard and pump it out to the net via Icecast or similar. I'm not too concerned about that.

Does anyone have any experience of broadcasting internet radio under linux? Hints, tips and general advice would also be greatly appreciated. Cheers.

You need two things. First, a patched real time kernel, it will induce less latency than Windows or standard Linux. It is much better for audio. The second thing is the JACK audio subsystem. For applications that support it. It will allow you to threat stream as stream, and not as something that go from point A to point B (you don't need to hijack and fork them, they are only stream right from the start, you have control over them).

http://jackaudio.org/
http://qjackctl.sourceforge.net/

You can see qjackctl in action on the right side of this (ardour) screenshot http://ardour.org/files/ardour-2.5.png

In fact, it is used by professionals more than "normal" audio user. It is very advanced and sometime a little bit too complicated to setup, but once it is working, you will love.

If you have yet to decide on a linux distribution (distro) I would suggest you look at UbuntuStudio and 64Studio. They both have real-time kernels, jackaudio, ardour, and a whole lot more 'out-of-the-box'.