ShoutCast was (is, I guess) great. I was lucky to know a guy who worked for a small ISP/hosting company in the early/mid '00s and he carved me out a little bit of free hosting space to run the server. Bandwidth was never worth worrying about as I never had more than 10-15 people listening to a 128k/sec stream - low for local playback, but great when I only had "Unlimited 3G!" on my Treo and wanted to listen to my own personal radio in the car.
Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.
Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.
Also, agreed about the visualizer being a great quick and dirty source for projections. Later on I still fired it up and routed it into Resolume for that purpose. There were other options but it worked.
Never used it for zoned audio per se, but I had my phone set up to control it running on my PC and streaming to Chromecast audio or other devices around the house, so it sorta counts in the hacky way I used it when having people over.