[LAU] Linux radio / streaming tips?

[Len Ovens]

On Mon, January 28, 2013 9:01 am, Dan MacDonald wrote:

> Has anyone on the list tried more than one of Airtime, IDJC and Rivendell
> (plus any of the other solutions) enough to make a good comparison?

The only comparison I can make is IDJC and an analog station (CBC Northern
services). IDJC does pretty much what any analog setup for one control
room might do.

Because the audio is all Jack, it would be quite possible to have one
computer running an ijdc as an on-air control room and switch other
computers with their own IDJC instance  in and out (using netjack)...

It seemed to be that on-air control would do music and spots, but switch
to another studio for news or interview type shows (if they were live,
most would be prerecorded). It could just as easy go to a transmitter as a
codec to Inet.

Where we had cart machine and turntables for music, spots and prerecorded
shows, these have files. The files can be precoded as mp3, ogg, flac or
whatever, but IDJC decodes them to audio for mixing anyway so flac or wav
files would mean the audio output could be broadcast quality and there
should be no problem with using files head to head of different file type
or sample rate... At any one time you might have as many as 4 different
file streams being mixed together (not practical or likely, just
possible).

I have not tried pulling in anything direct from CD or a bank of CD
machines. Most desktops show the songs on an audio CD as wav files though,
so it should be possible... I have noticed that it sometimes seems to take
a while for the DE to get to the point of showing the wav files, but if
they are put in far enough ahead of use it should be fine. Most computers
can handle 3 or 4 CD/DVD players these days.... I would stick to two
though, as I have seen opening one drive stop the other from playing while
it opens if they are both on the same IDE cable.

IDJC just deals with the audio path, it does not deal with the admin at
all. Some of the other software does I think (Rivendell?).


-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net