Linux Radio Station Automation?

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."

Comments

Re:Spoiled rich high school

[RomulusNR]

Wow, overrated. You seem to assume that high school kids (or anyone else) working for a radio station are paid. And your average educational station puts out at a paltry 10W. I have a handheld CB with more output than that.

Some manage to do more than that, and they manage to be mostly member-supported, thanks to their pre-existing popularity. I only know of one, though.

So, in short, you're an idiot.

Why use RAID 0?

[swillden]

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.