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Radio jockey

RSS Feed Category: Multimedia, desktop — Other products by this author
The simple Internet radio broadcaster.

Current release

No stable release available yet.

Experimental releases

Upcoming and alpha/beta/candidate releases

  • Alpha releases should only be used for testing and development.
  • Beta releases and Release Candidates are normally released for production testing, but should not be used on mission-critical sites.
  • Always install on a separate test server first, and make sure you have proper backups before installing.
Radio jockey 0.0.1 (Alpha release) Released Nov 30, 2008
First public release.

Project Description

Project resources

Radio jockey is a very simple program you can use to broadcast live on your Internet radio. All you need to do is grab the mike stand, hit Play on your music player, turn the right inputs on, say "testing, 1-2-3" and hit the Record button. It's that simple.

It is free software distributed under the GPL, it works well with all of your sound applications on your Linux computer, and it uses the powerful GStreamer multimedia framework (made by Fluendo) and the PulseAudio sound server.

What Radio jockey does

In simple terms, Radio jockey:

  1. records sound from your applications, line inputs and microphones,
  2. shows you the peak and RMS levels of each channel,
  3. mixes these recordings, in real-time,
  4. plays the mix back into a sound output of your computer (if you want to),
  5. encodes the mix into MP3, and
  6. sends it to your SHOUTcast or Icecast Internet radio server.

How Radio jockey works

Modern Linux distributions route sound into PulseAudio, which does the dirty work of routing each application's sound into the correct output. PulseAudio is also nice enough to provide a "monitor input" for each output, and this is precisely the feature Radio jockey uses to record real-time sound, in addition to the regular microphone and line-level inputs.

When you're broadcasting with Radio jockey, the PulseAudio volume control comes in very handy. Use it as a switching board to move applications among outputs and control their playback volumes, so you always get the mix you want. Additionally, you can set up your PulseAudio server to provide any number of "virtual outputs" you can plug your applications into, so your radio never runs out of sound.

What Radio jockey requires on your computer

Your computer must have these software packages:

  1. PulseAudio, installed and running.
  2. Compatible PulseAudio applications. Practically all applications are, provided you've set up your ALSA configuration correctly (most large distributions usually ship this configuration).
  3. Python.
  4. GStreamer.
  5. The Python bindings for GStreamer and GTK+.

All major distributions include these packages, either as default or in their package manager repositories. You can get these things in a matter of minutes, so there's no excuse not to try Radio jockey.

Additionally, you need a SHOUTcast or Icecast server handy. Temporarily, I'm providing you with my own Icecast server configuration so you can test the application.

Once you have these requirements fulfilled, you can install it using the Python's distutils instructions.