Thrilling Adventures in Rhyme and Space

Following on from my previous post, I’ve discovered a great bit of open source software to help run this radio station we’re starting at work.

Liquidsoap is a powerful, script-based audio stream generator. Awesome for setting up a radio station and letting it run, hands off, on the server.

It might look daunting, but very quickly I was able to set up a stream which played random tracks from a directory or playlist and randomly threw in a station jingle. Couple of days hacking and now I’ve got it chiming the time at the top of the hour as well as crossfading between tracks and it will even switch to a live feed when it begins.

It’s offline at them moment while we replace my testing Ubuntu server with a Debian one. I’ve taken this time to mess about with the live stream elements of the station. I replaced the os just before Xmas with Debian Lenny to see if I could get Skype working nice with the Jack based DJ console. It worked a bit but was very flaky and unreliable. Today I installed Ubuntu Studio and recompiled Pulseaudio with Jack support. Now I can get Skype to work with the DJ console by pumping all the pulseaudio sound through Jack. Now I’ve gotta make sure these hacks of mine are stable and will play nice all the time.