Best way to get a shoutcast stream into Breakaway Live?

Hi

I am currently testing out the demo version of Breakaway Live with a view to hopefully buying it and using in our new webcast project. I am very impressed and looking forward to using Breakaway in earnest.

However, I have one or two headaches over the best way to incorporate it into our proposed stream chain.

I am not an expert in these matters (although do have a certain amount of experience) so please be patient with me and feel free to offer any advice for improving on my proposed set-up.

OK, here is the background. The proposal is to stream a lot of automatic playlist content, with occassional live content provided by presenters around the world. Currently we are testing this scenario in the following way:

– Automatic playlist content is sourced from SAM Broadcaster running on a Datacenter hosted Win 2008 Server, the encoders in SAM are used to connect to shoutcast server running on the same box.

– Shoutcast Transcoder (sc_trans) is used to control the transition between automatic and live content. Basically it is configured to relay the stream from the sc_serv instance source by SAM until a Live presenter connects their stream to the DJ Interface on sc_trans. Once The Presenter disconnects, sc_trans xfades back to the relayed local SAM stream.

– The final stream from sc_trans is streamed to the broadcast endpoints.

All of this works perfectly so far, however, my headaches begin when I try to think about how and where I should insert Breakaway into this chain.

Obviously it is simple enough to insert Breakaway into the SAM pipeline via the livelink DSP, but this does not address the issue of how to insert it for the Live Presenters. The logical point would, of course, be a single instance of breakaway at the end of the whole chain (or immediately before sc_trans which distributes to the different endpoint servers) … however … The only way I can think of to use a shoutcast stream as an input to Breakaway is to receive it through some kind of media player and then use livelink to pass it through breakaway which really doesnt sound like a great idea to me …..

I can simplify the above issue by saying: I need to take an incoming stream from a live source and run it through breakaway on a remote Win2008 server. The remote server issue, of course, introduces the additional restriction that I cannot use the breakawy pipelines due to the remote audio issue with Win2k8 through RDC.

One solution that did occur to me was simply picking up the Live stream through SAM, but that way seems full of potential issues (if the live source should disconnect for an instant, for example, SAM would move on to the rest of its playlist).

The only other solution that I can think of at this moment is something like: …
Live Source -> shoutcast server -> WinAmp -> livelink -> Breakaway

But (and as I have said, I am no expert) this sounds horrendous to me, adding potentially weak links to the chain … I am also concerned about the amount of re-encoding of a previosuly encoded stream – as I said I am no expert, but it would seem to me that the fewer encoders along the chain the better ….

Any thoughts would be appreciated, is there another way to get a shoutcast stream into breakaway ?

Thanks
exosphere