Hi all. We have been running a local community FM radio station (https://paekakariki.fm) for several years now using Airtime. Local DJs come into the station and do a live show which is also recorded and re-broadcasted periodically at scheduled times for the rest of the month.
We’ve had to stick with Airtime rather than move to Libretime because the recording function is required and is not available in Libretime yet. We’ve managed to dockerize Airtime and have made a few modifications so that we can record via a stream rather than a local soundcard. It works OK but it does fall over on a fairly regular basis - there are many bugs still within Airtime which we really don’t want to spend time on trying to fix.
The trust that runs the radio station does have access to some funding and asked me to see if that might help to move things along a bit with regard to getting the recording and re-broadcasting functions happening within Libretime… If there is anyone interested in doing this for a little bit of money please PM me. @robbt? @hairmare? We’d be more than happy to help out with testing, etc, and show you what we’ve done on the stream recording front.
There is also a lot of interest in this from a community resilience perspective - broadcasting locally using a portable radio kit in the event of an earthquake for example. Being able to record bulletins and rebroadcast periodically would be very useful in this scenario.
Hello Daniel, thanks for posting. We are actually in discussion about setting up an OpenCollective account to receive money and pay contributors for specific work and so this might be a good way to start using that if you are interested in having your station contribute if and when we set it up. We are talking about if on the 26th.
With regards to what your station needs it sounds like you need stream recording vs. hardware recording and for this to be integrated into LibreTime. Is that correct ?
I think that this would be a good addition to LibreTime but would require a bit of planning and lots of testing. What are some of the causes of failure you have run into with your ad-hoc dockerized Airtime for instance.
Thanks for posting, feel free to follow up here or PM me.
So this feature/function would be very useful and save a great deal of time. It was what attracted me to AirTime years ago even though it was never a fully working part of AT.
What would be needed to get it in place ? If for example I knew coders with the required skillset (and I do) how would they go about coding this and making it happen ?
I assume that a sound card would be needed on the server to handle the sound recording ?
A sound card wouldn’t be required - we have cloud-based version Airtime recording from a stream (it was a trivial modification). The ability to record and rebroadcast is the only thing stopping us from moving to Libretime.
Hey @Paul you are welcome to discuss features here but when it comes to actually implementing them in code we will make the decisions via github. You can just think of it as a more technical forum here is one requesting the ability to record from the stream vs. requiring a hardware audio out - https://github.com/LibreTime/libretime/issues/291 - the challenge like most things LibreTime at the moment is that there are select few coders and most of us are pretty busy with various other aspects of our lives so dedicating time to implement new features and functionalities is pretty rare. @dmandan - if you could share your code via a PR to the Github that would be beneficial.
Would you want to open up a PR with your sample code so we can merge it into the main project. Rebroadcast could happen as a separate PR but merging this in would be helpful to people. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.