I’ve been perfecting my Neuse Radio streaming station lately and I’ve almost gotten it to the point where I can let the world listen.
It’s running on the open-source Rivendell radio automation suite, patched through the open-source JACK audio server, encoded with the open-source DarkIce encoder, streamed with the open-source Icecast2 server, and hosted on my CentOS-based VPS in Ashburn, Virginia.
It’s so automated that I don’t have to do anything to keep the music flowing. If I want I can add some chatter (called voice-tracking in the industry parlance) between songs to give it a live sound, but I tend to let the music run without interruption.
I love how it’s all self-contained, too. It’s all on my hosted server, so if I lose power or Internet at the house the music keeps playing. When I began building it, I put it on my home server and tried streaming it from there. It wasn’t long before I bumped up against the pathetic upload bandwidth limit of my ISP.
Rivendell was built to be used on touch screens and it shows. It’s got a great interface but it’s not one that was meant to be used on a headless box like mine. That means I had to install X on my hosted server to get it to work. That’s what I did, but rather than connect using the slow X protocol I made use of the FreeNX server, which provides snappy display performance over the Internet.
What’s left to do? Add more music, really, and maybe decide if I want to include weather announcements or voice-tracking. Once I get that straightened out I will point my Icecast stream to one of the new radio-streaming services that calculate and pay the music royalties so I don’t have to.
I’ll also write up a radio-station recipe here soon, too, so others can make use of it. Rock on!