Thrilling Adventures in Rhyme and Space

A project I’ve been working on at work has been to set up an Internet radio station for the college. This is an initial test to prove the viability to the powers that be and maybe get some new equipment to run it full time.

The software I’m running at the moment is as follows:

On the server I have Ubuntu Server 9.10, mainly because I’m used to Ubuntu and I knew  could get LAMP up and running immediately. The stream is run by Icecast, easily configured with simple XML. The stream can be listened to via port 8000 in VLC or Winamp, or through a flash applet on the site called Native Flash Radio. I’ve also tried using Ices and Ezstream to play simple playlists server-side out of hours. Again, they both are configured with XML files.

On the source pc I have Kubuntu 9.10, initially to avoid Pulseaudio clashing with Jack. However the KDE sound system Phonon still gives me problems with Jack. The streaming software I’m using is Internet DJ Console, available from the Ubuntu repos. It uses Jack, has a lot of neat features and has some VoIP support via Jack. Right now I can play music on a playlist, crossfade between two lists, slip in some jingles and pipe live audio through a microphone.

The other thing we would like to be able to do is call in via VoIP. IDJC has the interface to do this easily with buttons that let the DJ talk to the caller “offair” before piping them through to the stream. However, we’ve gotta use Skype, which doesn’t have Jack support.

There is a way to pipe the sound from Skype into Jack via ALSA. However asound2-plugins in Ubuntu isn’t compiled with Jack support. I understand that’s because asound2 is in the main repo and Jack is in Universe. I’ve now got to work out how to recompile, not something I’m used to but might be easier than starting from scratch running something like Debian Sid or Ubuntu Studio.