DarkIce is an IceCast, IceCast2 and ShoutCast live audio streamer. It takes audio input from a sound card, encodes it into mp3 and/or Ogg Vorbis, and sends the mp3 stream to one or more IceCast and/or ShoutCast servers, the Ogg Vorbis stream to one or more IceCast2 servers. DarkIce uses lame as a shared object as its mp3 encoder, and the Ogg Vorbis as its Ogg Vorbis encoder.

A legacy SYSV init script is provided for existing configurations. You have to set RUN=yes in /etc/default/darkice to run darkice as a daemon. With modern systems, this is not needed as realtime scheduling is available to normal users.