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Linux Radio Station Automation?

Posted by Cliff on from the automated-broadcasting dept.

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."

11 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Check this: by Mind+Booster+Noori · · Score: 4, Informative

    Otto Audio jukebox.

    --
    Mind Booster Noori
  2. Hourly? Hmm... by PaulBu · · Score: 2, Informative

    They have this tool called 'cron', maybe... ;-)

    Paul B.

    1. Re:Hourly? Hmm... by tverbeek · · Score: 2, Informative
      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....

      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 probably owned by another multi-station company). It's simply not cost-effective to pay someone to actually push buttons (or open a mike and talk) at that hour, when you can get a computer to do it for you. If you turn on a commercial radio station and hear a voice talking during overnights, it was probably recorded the day before, and inserted by whatever proprietary software they have running the place. Top-of-hour (within FCC paramaters) station IDs are a standard feature of those systems.

      --
      http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  3. LiveSupport by lbmouse · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://freshmeat.net/projects/livesupport

  4. Why lossless? by bkissi01 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Why would you encode the CDs losslessly? Correct me if I'm wrong but I do believe that FM radio is about half the quality of a normal CD, so you could encode the songs in something like MP3 or Ogg and still not have your listeners notice a difference in quality. This would save you disk space so you could then run a redundant disk array to protect against hd failure.

    1. Re:Why lossless? by ColaMan · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's hardly the case with FM radio.

      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.

      --

      You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
      There is a lot of hype here.
  5. Re:Simple perl script by SenatorTreason · · Score: 3, Informative

    Also, contact http://www.radioparadise.com./ The owner/operator was spotlighted in Linux Journal a few years ago about his control system, 100% homebrew, FOSS product. He might have quite a few tips for you.

  6. Salem Radio Labs does this and more under the GPL. by Rocky+Mudbutt · · Score: 4, Informative
    From http://www.salemradiolabs.com/rivendell/

    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.

    --
    Ethics II Axiom 2. "Man thinks." B. Spinoza
  7. Re:Radio Free Peterborough by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    You should check out Radio Free Peterborough's setup.

    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).

  8. Re:How about this? by SupremeTaco · · Score: 2, Informative

    FCC rules state that the annoucement has to be at the top of the hour, or as close as possible to that time, every hour. For example, if your song finishes at 09:59:47, you're golden. If it finishes at 10:01:05, you can fade the song out before the top of the hour, and play the ID. That works well with instrumentals, but not so good with the vocal stuff.

    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 or distant station, you're a slave to their timing. If their program starts at 1:00:00, then you almost have to fade the song before the top of the hour, before you cut back to the satellite feed.

    --
    You have a constitutionally protected right to be wrong, and I the right to ignore you.
  9. Re:How about this? by man_ls · · Score: 2, Informative

    Having worked at a high-power FM station in the Atlanta area within the last year, you have to do a legal ID within 5 minutes of :00, although if it's 5 minutes before, or 5 minutes after, its okay.