Hello all, this email sorta serves as a reference for the system I will be talking about in future emails and with myself implementing liquidsoap on our servers.
Anyway, I run admin for KUBE Radio, which is Keele University's student radio station and we've been running over the net for a few years. I'd say check out http://www.kuberadio.com but the current webmasters replaced http://web.archive.org/web/20060402220753/http://kuberadio.com/with the new *improved* site. Our servers exist of the following: Broadcast - Gentoo, Icecast, Darkice, Streamripper, PHP, Apache Sustain - Fedora, MPD Studio - Gentoo Our Stream chain currently goes Studio Mixer Desk -> Darkice -> Icecast -> Web (with the sustain being an input on the mixer desk) Whilst I understand liquidsoap can handle a sustain stream, for now I wish to leave mpd outputting the stream, mainly as I've got a user friendly interface for the management bod's to modify. So what features am I looking for the stream? Dead air detection, Automatic News service, GUI to alert studio of events jingles nagios implementation (external server) Dead air detection seems quite straight forward and David B has directed me in ways, the next thing is the news service. The dj's are absolutely useless at news, they either talk over it or suddenly remember half way through. Our news service comes from IRN on Hotbird 7, some satellite box of which there is an audio feed. My intentions are to add another soundcard to the broadcast stream and give liquidsoap an alsa input for it. The news broadcast is on clockwork, it will come on at a certain time apparently. When not broadcasting the service says something like "*BEEP* *BEEP* this is IRN on Hotbird 7 *BEEP* *BEEP*" and I *think* they even do some extra bullitens and announce it on the stream they provide. So hence it'll be really good to get liquidsoap to be checking the stream at the right time and if the news stream is active (ie no BEEP BEEP) then fade off the studio stream. These intentions have been expressed by the management. So if anyone has any thoughts on this, or knows hotbird more, then please reply. I am also wondering about replacing darkice initially, I know liquidsoap does everything (and more) that darkice does, however I've yet to be able to know the uptime on our server for the service and was thinking if I should keep darkice for now and provide a fallback on icecast to the original darkice streams. So I'm sure I'll have plenty more to rabble on about in the future, but liquidsoap does seem awesome for what I need to get done. Cheers!
