Linux Radio Station Automation? 59
miazmatic asks: "I am one of the tech managers for my high school's FM radio station. We have been using Rhythmbox on Debian to play music after hours when no one is broadcasting. However, it took some pretty ugly hacks to get it to transmit the station ID every hour. We are adding a 600GB RAID 0 VG to our PC (P4 2.4/512MB), to which we plan to encode all our CDs losslessly. Along with this upgrade I would also like to find a permanent solution for broadcasting the station ID hourly. Has anyone used Linux to run a radio station before? Can anyone suggest a F/OSS software package or solution? Any help is appreciated."
Word of advice (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Word of advice (Score:1)
A second point, do you have permission to broadcast the music you'll be playing? Its fine to do a bit of filesharing if you want, because that's your liability, but will your station e broadcasting the latest Britney over the FM spectrum not require royal
Not the drives, the card! (Score:2)
Re:Not the drives, the card! (Score:2)
Use software RAID. Performance (in this application) will be just as good and you can use cheap, off the shelf 4-port SATA adapters.
Re:Word of advice (Score:2)
Seconded. Go with RAID5 - you only lose one disk's worth of space and since the vast bulk of your data access is going to be reading, the average performance impact will be negligible. When (not if) you have a drive failure, a) you won't have any downtime and b) you won't have to re-rip hundreds of CDs worth of music.
Get some 4 port SATA con
Re:Word of advice (Score:2)
Re:Word of advice (Score:1)
Check this: (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Check this: (Score:2)
I've used the above and am confident you can build a solution around them. Freshmeat shows [freshmeat.net] tons more.
Hourly? Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Paul B.
Re:Hourly? Hmm... (Score:2)
Nice snappy comeback, but you don't hear commercial stations just suddenly interrupt a song to bring you a station ID. Now, they have live DJ's, but the same planning holds true--you have to schedule the station ID in between songs, but as close to the top of the hour (or whatever interval is needed) as possible. This is not an easy task for most playlist systems. Unless you will be pre-planning playlists down to the minute, it's not possible without software assistance.
Re:Hourly? Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hourly? Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Um, no they don't.
Not on overnights. Not at a commercial station in 2005.
OK, I'm over-generalising a little, but at most commercial radio stations, the only person in the building at 3am is the guy watching the monitors (usually covering several stations at once, because even if it isn't one of the several Clear-Channel stations in that market, it's
Re:Hourly? Hmm... (Score:2)
Radio Free Peterborough (Score:1)
I don't know if they broadcast the station ID automagically every hour, however:
- they do have a DIY Internet Radio Guide (for streaming)
- Steve (who runs the show) might have a few good ideas).
Re:Radio Free Peterborough (Score:1, Informative)
I don't know if they broadcast the station ID automagically every hour, however:
- they do have a DIY Internet Radio Guide (for streaming)
- Steve (who runs the show) might have a few good ideas).
LiveSupport (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Spoiled rich high school (Score:2, Interesting)
Some manage to do more than that [c895fm.com], and they manage to be mostly member-supported [adhost.com], thanks to their pre-existing popularity. I only know of one, though.
So, in short, you're an idiot.
Re:Spoiled rich high school (Score:2)
Their prime focus is Jazz music, with a very popular Bluegrass series on Saturday mornings. They have done a lot of local event coverage, including weekly episodes at various jazz venues in the Minnesota Twin Cities area.
~Rusty
Simple perl script (Score:2)
Re:Simple perl script (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Simple perl script (Score:1)
Why lossless? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why lossless? (Score:2)
Re:Why lossless? (Score:1)
Re:Why lossless? (Score:4, Informative)
FM has limited bandwith (11kHz or so for a good reciever).
You will lose all the high frequency component of audio cd's, so why bother encoding it in the first place? You could encode 128kbps stereo MP3 at a 22 (or 32) kHz sample rate and there would be no percievable difference after FM broadcast to lossless encoding (with a decent encoder, that is)
Then at least they could go to a raid array with *some* redundancy.
Re:Why lossless? (Score:2)
If you live in the LA area you can see what I mean any day on the channel 7 news. They now have a helicopter equiped with HD cameras, and the quality difference is quite noticable, even through an SD signal.
I very much doubt that the difference isn't perceptable. The audience might not know any better, or they might not blame you, or they might not care, but I'm quite sure that if
Re:Why lossless? (Score:1)
My station runs songs ripped at 128 with no outstanding quality issues.
Re:Why lossless? (Score:2)
How do you track that?
Re:Why lossless? (Score:2)
FM has limited bandwith (11kHz or so for a good reciever).
This is obviously some strange new definition of "good" of which I was previously unaware.
15kHz is what you should expect from a "good" receiver.
On the other hand, the stereo separation tends to collapse a bit above 11kHz. That may be what you are thinking of.
Salem Radio Labs does this and more under the GPL. (Score:4, Informative)
Rivendell aims to be a complete radio broadcast automation solution, with the facilities for the acquisition, management, scheduling and playout of audio content. As a robust, functionally complete digital audio system for broadcast radio applications, Rivendell uses industry standard components like the GNU/Linux Operating System, the AudioScience HPI Driver Architecture and the MySQL Database Engine. Rivendell is being developed under the GNU Public License.
heh (Score:2)
Why use RAID 0? (Score:3, Interesting)
RAID 0, also known as striping, is useful for obtaining very high I/O bandwidth at the expense of making every one of the constituent disks a single point of failure. Lose any one of the drives, and you lose all of your data.
I can see that if you lose all of the data you won't really have lost much, since you can always re-rip it, but why take the risk? You don't need high I/O bandwidth for CD-quality audio... it's only 86KBps uncompressed, and an average ATA-100 hard drive can easily sustain over 200 times that data rate. Since you plan to encode the data, you'll need even less bandwidth, probably half as much if you're using a lossless codec.
I wouldn't use RAID-0 for this. Use linear RAID or, since you mentioned volume groups, just let the volume manager append the volumes. The result will allow you to keep most of your data in the event a drive fails and will be plenty fast for your application. If you're not tight on space, I'd say you might as well go for RAID-5 and get yourself a little insurance against data loss. If your 600GB consists of three 200GB disks, you'd still have 400GB of RAID-5 storage, which is a lot of audio CDs. About 800 of them with no compresssion, double that with lossless compression, or quadruple that with high-quality lossy compression.
How about this? (Score:1)
the top of the hour, or just that it happen at least
once per hour?
If the latter, try to use the jukebox software to
announce after every song, or every 5 songs, or whatever number would ensure that it happened at least once an hour.
If it has to be at the top of the hour, this won't help.
Re:How about this? (Score:2, Informative)
On the other hand, you can wait till the song is finished, and THEN play the ID. Problem is, if you're running satellite or rebroadcasting a larger
Re:How about this? (Score:2)
Unless of course the listener happens to like and be familiar with that instrumental, in which case it's really infuriating.
Re:How about this? (Score:2)
Unless of course the listener happens to like and be familiar with that instrumental, in which case it's really infuriating.
Hell yeah! I hate it when I'm listening to a really good instrumental at the end of the song and some dumb announcer who loves the sound of his own voice starts babbling over the top of it.
That might be why I listen to my own (bought) collection rather than dumb radio stations.
Re:How about this? (Score:2)
Announcers don't usually talk when they have become lonely for the sound of their own voice but rather when it is dictated by the rules of the format which are handed down to them from above and are
Re:How about this? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How about this? (Score:1)
FCC Rules: CFR 47, Part 73.1201 (Score:1)
(a) WHEN REGULARLY REQUIRED:
Broadcast station identification announcements shall be made: (1) At the beginning and ending of each time of operation, and (2) hourly, as close to the hour as feasible, at a natural break in program offerings. Television broadcast stations may make these announcements visually or aurally.
(b) CONTENT:
(1) Official station identification shall consist of the station's call letters immediately followed by the community or communities specified in i
not running on linux (Score:2)
too much thinking (Score:2)
Or just patch a real audio mixer into the equation that plays every 15 minutes no matter what
Re:too much thinking (Score:2)
Perl Script (Score:2)
We used text to speach and got it to say the time or read a fortune. It was fun. The only problem we had was the pause between songs which took us a while to fix.
Re:Perl Script (Score:1)
MPD and monitor client? (Score:2)
Run a cron job at 15 before the hour - have the job be a client to the mpd and:
1. determine the time remaining on the current song vs. clock time and the playtime of the upcoming songs. It should be simple math to decide which song to play the station ID after.
2. monitor the mpd some more.
3. stop it when you reach that point.
4. save the playlist and the current position within it.
5. load the playlist with the station ID.
6. play it.
7. load the original playlist.
8. st
It's been done (Score:2)
I've always thought that iTunes on a Mac or a Windows PC wouldn't be a bad broadcast automation system, but a Linux box would be cheaper than a Mac and easier to maintain than Windows.
Do it yourself. (Score:2)
Have an op spend an hour picking from the library of tracks and previously-recorded legal IDs, and make it into some coherant progression.
That'll give it a human touch, and still keep you legal.
That's what I did when I worked for a station in Atlanta, I'd oftentimes come in off-hours, and set the computer system to play specific tracks in order, interspersed with legal messages, so that I was controlling the station but not actually on the air. It was great that way.