danyline February 19, 2019 at 11:27

How do we make corporate radio for our

Once upon a time, our sound designer got the idea to twist his music in an office toilet (just like in bars). We decided to test, set the first setup: in the box was a smartphone with a playlist in AIMP, which was connected to a broadcast amplifier, and the playlist was uploaded to the memory card from the computer. Crutches, but everything worked instantly. The tracks went to everyone, and began to develop the idea to internal radio. I will tell which article on Habré we took as a basis, what have changed and I will show a comic as a bonus - a present from colleagues for music.

At first, the phone in the box seemed a good option for the concept. But I didn’t want to constantly download music to the phone, and somehow at the corporate party, I and sound designer Ilya Viktorov talked about broadcasting on the Internet. They agreed that it would be cool if all the toilets of the company from Belgorod to Limassol play the same good music. Moreover, the playlist really went to the team (in Slaka they constantly asked to drop tracks).

I climbed onto Habr and stumbled upon an article “Organization of musical accompaniment of a trading floor” . There @ Teon_501gives some useful links and tells how it is practical to organize broadcasting on a bundle from one computer with LibreTime and the second host. Plus, he set up an ad launch on time. In short, his solution consists of a finished LibreTime assembly, which includes a web-based admin panel with LiquidSoap, and broadcast via IceCast.

A great option, we tried to do the same (but without advertising) and for a long time used it. As a result, we compiled an up-to-date list of pros and cons for our situation.

Pros:

Convenient and easy setup.
Stability (nothing has fallen).
There is a page with an online player and schedule.

Cons (at the moment, many of them have already been fixed):

A built-in module that automatically calculates Fade in and Fade out when tracks are autoload, and does it very badly. Cuts many tracks to a minute ( UPD: updating the silan library to the latest version will now help ).
Not updated ( UPD: then the project was not updated as often as it is now )
The need to make a broadcast schedule separately for each day ( UPD: in the comments they say that there is no longer - you can make a “connected” program and roll it to infinity ).
Redundant functionality for our simple task.
I did not like the built-in music mixer, the tracks were often repeated.
Limited playlist length.

But for ourselves we have compiled a huge playlist that we wanted to fill in and randomly lose for a very long time. Therefore, in the next iteration, we simplified everything and replaced LibreTime with a bunch of IceCast with MPD. There are many articles on Habré describing all this (you can be inspired here or here ), and I will give a brief description of the setting.

I chose Ubuntu Server 18.04 as the broadcast server:

We put Icecast and MPD

sudo apt install mpd icecast2

Then we correct the MPD config

sudo vi /etc/mpd.conf

And we bring it to this form (in fact, this is the default config with the edited settings of the output device and the buffer)

music_directory "/var/lib/mpd/music"

playlist_directory "/var/lib/mpd/playlists"

db_file "/var/lib/mpd/tag_cache"

log_file "/var/log/mpd/mpd.log"

pid_file "/run/mpd/pid"

state_file "/var/lib/mpd/state"

sticker_file "/var/lib/mpd/sticker.sql"

user "mpd"

bind_to_address "0.0.0.0"

port "6600"

log_level "default"

metadata_to_use "artist,album,title,track,name,genre,date,composer,performer,disc"

auto_update "yes"

auto_update_depth "3"

default_permissions "read,add,control,admin"

audio_output

{

 type "shout"

 encoding "mp3"

 name "Pixonic FM"

 host "localhost"

 port "8000"

 mount "/_a"

 password "613112"

 bitrate "192"

 format "44100:16:2"

 protocol "icecast2"

}

replaygain "auto"

replaygain_preamp "0"

replaygain_missing_preamp "0"

replaygain_limit "yes"

volume_normalization "no"

filesystem_charset "UTF-8"

audio_buffer_size "2048"

buffer_before_play "50%"

Fill files, enable as a service and restart mpd

systemctl enabled mpd

systemctl restart mpd && systemctl status mpd

The IceCast config from the box is working, but I still advise you to change at least the password in the /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml file (by default it is hackme ).

At this stage, the setup is complete, now you can connect your favorite player to the mpd server and start the tracks. I like ncmpc, but you can choose another one to your liking. There are web clients there to manage the playlist through the browser, but our playlist does not change so often.

Now on your_server: 8000 / _a you can listen to your broadcast, but it is better, of course, to insert the link in the VLC.

Although there are many more plans, this is the case when you need to do it easier. For example, make a home page. Now we just give away the stream for customers, which can be listened through VLC.

To-Do List:

make it so that employees can offer tracks directly on the web;
and vote for the next track.

Ilya is responsible for the sound, which initially came up with the idea. Now there are already a lot of tracks in the playlist, plus jingles specially made for such an event.

Music, mainly, was selected background. I wanted everyone to like her, and here a great experience in writing tracks and compiling playlists for events helped. Mostly it’s light liquid funk, chillwave, deep house, dub techno, some ambient music, electronic pop, some indie rock and some easter eggs from games. Plus separate playlists for the Christmas holidays, Valentine's Day, Halloween, War Robots birthday and other events.

PS Pleasant for us personally, I wanted to share. When it worked, the guys from other departments - Yegor Gafidov, Dasha Karyakina, Anastasia Kolchina and Sofia Solomonova - gave us a cool gift in the form of a comic strip:

CONTINUED COMIC

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How do we make corporate radio for our

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