Comment by 🛸 bluesman
Re: "Brought my internet radio station into Gemini"
I forgot to mention, all four streams play great in Alhena with embedded VLC. They also all work if you configure Alhena to use an external player. I use: ffplay -loglevel quiet %1
Cool station.
Jan 27 · 3 months ago
7 Later Comments ↓
@jprjr Just FYI, I found out firsthand that the MacOS version of Lagrange doesn't play opus. I thought about re-encoding my own station to vorbis but it didn't seem worth it to me (all things considered).
🎮 jprjr [OP] · Jan 27 at 14:07:
@bluesman at one point I had grand plans for the web front-end to offer multiple streams with sample-accurate playback. So you could have say, AAC-LC, xHE-AAC, and FLAC streams, all in HLS, timed ID3 metadata, with the correct timing/padding info that you should be able to switch between streams seemlessly.
I wrote a tool to do all that from a single source FLAC stream - https://github.com/jprjr/icecast-hls
I was using Icecast to host the source FLAC so I figured, I should add Icecast output as well.
And now - the web front-end just has the single HLS stream and doesn't use any of the embedded metadata (it gets it out-of-band) and I find myself using the Icecast streams way more often!
🎮 jprjr [OP] · Jan 27 at 14:15:
But anyways, that may make it easier to offer multiple encodes, though I admit - I'm pretty certain something like ffmpeg could handle multiple encodes.
I'm unsure if ffmpeg offers the same metadata feature. Basically - I use a chained FLAC-in-Ogg bitstream to have updating metadata, and that metadata gets passed along to the final outputs. Either as timed ID3 for HLS streams, or chained Ogg bitstreams for Vorbis/Opus on Icecast.
Last I checked ffmpeg only decodes the first set of tags in chained Ogg/FLAC https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/9778
I'm using a reverse proxy to serve the songs off a pi 5 in my house so I wanted low bandwidth, reasonable quality and I didn't want to re-encode. I jumped through hoops getting liquid soap running on the pi. The default install would seg fault. Why liquid soap? It's the only way I could figure out how to get a randomized song order on each iteration - at least without disconnecting clients when the playlist "recycled". Metadata was a nightmare. I gave up on having per song metadata and just set info for the entire stream.
All the tunes are served out of a ramdisk so I don't destroy the poor SD card over time.
It was a fun learning experience for sure. Not a lot of listeners though. No surprise. I can say with absolute confidence it's the only 100% original music station in Geminispace.
🎮 jprjr [OP] · Jan 27 at 17:53:
At one point I looked into Azuracast, which I believe integrates liquidsoap. It's pretty sweet but complex.
Mine is using Music Player Daemon, with an app I wrote (the chatbot) that connects to it and controls it, ensuring there's always music in the queue.
I know what you mean about the client disconnects - for MPD, I had to set a global sample rate + bit depth + channel count. Usually if any of those parameters change between tracks it disconnects clients, which makes sense.
MPD supports setting it per-output - but if you do the global setting, that also enables crossfading between tracks with different properties, since they all get normalized.
I forgot that Lagrange didn't have support for some of the codecs and that's why they didn't work. Sorry.
🎮 jprjr [OP] · Jan 28 at 17:03:
@Homer all good!! I didn't realize I typo'd the web links and you helped me fix that
Original Post
Brought my internet radio station into Gemini — Hi there everybody, just thought I'd share a small project I've been working on. I've been helping run an internet radio station featuring videogame music, and I thought it'd be neat to give it a Gemini presence. If your client supports it, you can stream music. There's links to a few different audio codecs (MP3, Opus, Vorbis, AAC). You can also use a client certificate to register an IRC...