MPD is a great little project that collects, organizes, and plays your music files for you. You can connect to MPD and listen to your music in a great number of ways. You can even stream your music out as your own radio station (Mildred makes use of this functionality).
I’ve always thought it odd that MPD would stream in Ogg, but not MP3. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of open standards and all, but MP3 is just so dominant, that I was surprised MP3 streaming hadn’t been implemented. Add to that the stupid inability of Apple’s iTunes to stream Ogg and well, it motivated me. I sat down and hacked together a MPD plugin that allows you to stream MP3 to your shoutcast server from MPD.
Source patches for the plugin are available here: http://kill-0.com/patches/shout_mp3.patch
It’s rough around the edges, but it does work. You can even play it in iTunes.
Enjoy!