The History
When I was back in University I produced a student-led webcast once a week. It wasn’t the most watch webcast in the world with average viewing figures in the tens rather than the thousands but whilst doing it I learnt a lot about setting up, producing and even hosting live programming.
Then one day, not long after we got a new principal, I was asked if I knew anything about setting up a radio station. At the time the only radio experience I had was a weekly one hour slot on YouthComm Radio back when I was a teenager. I had no idea of the legalities and a very rough idea of the technical side of things. So I took on the project thinking it would be a great opportunity to learn something new.
I managed to price up all the equipment and find information on what licenses the college would need and where they could get a music library etc. Surprisingly, it’s wasn’t all that expensive (especially when you compare it to the cost of setting up a Live Video broadcast). I submitted my findings and didn’t hear anything back from the higher-ups and that was the last I thought about it.
Well, that was until a couple of weeks ago. Whilst in training for my new job someone mentioned how it would be great if there was a work radio and it reminded me of the radio project I planned out previously. So when I had a bit of spare time I had a look into what was needed to set up a simple internet radio station.
The Setup
If I wanted to go with the full Radio setup I’d need a studio space, A USB Audio Mixer, Microphones, CD/MP3 Players, Media Servers, A Broadcast server and a few other bits of technical glue to get it all to work together.
There is another way though, using a Laptop, a Cloud Server and a USB Microphone. I couldn’t believe my luck I could set all this up in my office for little to no cost and have my very own Internet Radio Station.
The thing I looked into was the playout software (used to play music from a computer as well as Jingles and adverts). I came across a few open-source software solutions that all ran on a Linux server in the cloud. I ended up using Mopidy. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it is really simple to use and has a similar layout to Spotify (and coincidentally also uses Spotify as a music source). The second is that the other software packages I found managed to crash the Tiny AWS server I was using. If I was to use a larger cloud server then I don’t think I would have had a problem, but I didn’t get a larger one free with my 12 months of free usage.
Out of the box though you can’t just play music out to the internet with Mopidy as it’s meant to consolidate all of your online music streaming services into one easy to use location so you can listen to them on your computer. This problem was solved with a bit of fiddling with IceCast2. IceCast2 is an internet streaming server. The great thing about IceCast2 is that you can set it up so that you have one constant stream that can be interrupted by another without breaking the stream for the listening. This was just the answer I was looking for as now I could have a playlist playing 24 hours a day from Spotify and then interrupt it from anywhere and host a live show, so long as I had a way to connect to the streaming server.
To connect to the streaming server I use a piece of software called Audio Hijack. It allows me to merge multiple audio sources together and send them to the streaming server. For a basic broadcast, all I need is a USB Microphone connected to my laptop, VLC Media Player (to play adverts and audio clips) and a music streaming app such as Spotify for music. If I want to go bigger with guests or a live band I would need a USB Audio Mixer that I can take the audio feed from and push into Audio Hijack. I’d still be able to use Spotify and VLC as before but this setup gives a lot more freedom and also can be used in a professional environment.
The great thing about this setup is that I can schedule different DJs from around the world at any time. The only thing we would need to be careful of is that the previous DJ had logged off Audio Hijack so the next one can login. The other great thing about the IceCast2 software is that you can setup as many radio stations as you like so long as your cloud server can cope with them.
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