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

Word of advice

[kensai]

Skip RAID 0 like the plague if this is your main storage area. Much much better to go with RAID 1+0 or RAID 5. RAID 0 is like tempting the HDD Gods for HDD failure.

Check this:

[Mind Booster Noori]

Otto Audio jukebox.

LiveSupport

[lbmouse]

http://freshmeat.net/projects/livesupport

Why lossless?

[bkissi01]

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.

Re:Why lossless?

[ColaMan]

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.

Re:Simple perl script

[SenatorTreason]

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.

Salem Radio Labs does this and more under the GPL.

[Rocky Mudbutt]

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.