R.O.S.S. - Free Software for Radio Automation

Free and Open Source Software for doing Radio (AM / FM etc.)

Aim

What are we up to? Build a suite of existing and to be coded programs, that would allow a radio, be it FM or AM - or internet only - to either fully automate its operations or assist its DJs in their work. Or as we say on the Project Page: "All you ever needed to run a FM-radio, but never dared to ask for as OSS / Free Software: studio automation, scheduling etc. Pointing to what's already out there, trying to build what's not."

By the way: In May 2005 "Ask Slashdot" featured the questions "Has anyone used Linux to run a radio station before? Can anyone suggest a F/OSS software package or solution?" And In May 2007 at the same place answers flocked in to the question "Migrating a Radio Station to Linux?"

Automation - good or bad?

Sure, you may very well think bad about todays mainly very strong formatted radios. At least most of the commercial ones sound all very much alike. This is made possible mainly through automation of music selection and transmission.
The responsible people make once a decision, how a station should sound, define its profile through accordingly setting the structure of the music in the clocks.
The clocks say exactly for every song / audio clip in every hour, what criteria it has to meet (like: start with a present hit, then play an oldie then a jazz piece from the 70ies and so forth).
and that's basically it. now you fill music into the repertoire, you add information about every piece in a database and out of this, the scheduler produces a playlist for the station, following strictly the rules of the defined clocks.
in the studio you will have a computer of some kind, that has access to the soundfiles. it either plays one after the other, with possible overlaps for smooth transitions if necessary. or it is coupled with a mixer and its fader-start-feature: when you lift a fader, it sends the connected sound source the signal to start playing. so you can have unattended radio, nobody there but the computer. or you can have the computer-setup help your radio-people.
Buying this stuff involves amounts of money mostly unavailable to small radios. But seen as a tool, automation can help small radios in their work too. Automation doesn't lead necessarily to bad, boring programs. It may help free the people to concentrate on producing content and transmit the content in a more professional sounding way. Not a bad thing, is it?

Elements

The basic necessary elements are:

a practical way to move either already digital or digitized sound into the stations repertoire
an audio editor to cut, mix etc. the digitized audio
a database of information about the soundfiles in the repertoire
a scheduler that produces a playlist according to the rules set by the clock editor
a clock editor that sets the rules for the scheduler
an interface for the DJs / presenters in the on-air-studio
software that plays the digital audio in the sequence that the playlist prescribes - either fully unattended, or under control by the DJs / presenters. It has to be able to play at least two files simultanously, needed for radiolike crossfades at the end of one audiofile, when the next starts. For assisting to work, we have to connect the "fader-start" contacts of a mixer with our on-air-computer: lifting the fader away from the bottom gives the signal to instantly start playing the next audiofile.
(thanks Andrew) a logger: "It needs to produce a set of logs that would satisfy the FCC. (Federal Communications Commission is the USA government organization that regulates broadcast) What played, when it played, and print/no print option once a day is quite important. Because in the US government officials can walk into your station and demand to see logs. If you can't produce them, you're finished!"
(thanks again, Andrew): satellite capability: "The other critical piece of automation that needs to be there in order to make a serious stab at real radio markets is satellite capability. The system needs to be able to monitor an RS-232 data stream (low bandwidth) and then use what it sees there to control audio inputs and/or an RS-422 input. If you can do that reliably to where you can put satellite programs in your scheduler with commands from the RS-232 able to effect program changes - now that would be big time."

Look around

The million dollar question is: What is already there as free software, and what do we miss? I grabbed these links mainly at Dave Phillips List of Sound & MIDI Software for Linux . It's really very useful, thanks Dave! His pages are now available at the following sites:

linuxsound.at (Europe)
linuxsound.ymo.org (Japan)
sound.condorow.net (USA)
linuxsound.bright.net (USA)

Others with similar intentions

On march 13 2008 I received this mail from Erasmo Alonso Iglesias: "I'm happy to announce you the appearing of a new open source radio automation system, ARAS. ARAS is a highly configurable radio automation system, it runs as a daemon, it is able to load the configuration at runtime and it currently works as scheduler."
On June 26 2007 I received a mail from Emile Bassil, where he wrote: "Hi Patrik, I am an Australian developer who has written a radio automation software in .NET for the Windows platform. The software is free (no commercial version and no feature limitation) to download and use." Sounds very promising. I haven't tested it, but maybe you feel like giving it a try? Go ahead!
Recently I stumbled across the software coming out of reboot.fm, which looks like it offers on-air, online and on-demand functionality, combined with decentralized contribution and transmission. Coming from Berlin.
February 16 2005 bedlam mailed: "I contribute to a project called mediabox404 which aim is to provide a powerful web interface to automate playlist creation, programing, live act and so on for webradios. It is now 100% GPL and public since 10 Februar 2005. The website is for now in French, but we're working hard to open it in English very soon. Please take a look ! URL : mediabox404.free.fr." I'd say: Give it a try!
January 12 2005 Jeremy Lees-Green informed me about ~~LiveSupport~~ Campcaster, to be released on February 1 2005, which sounds VERY promising in its selfdescription:
- LiveSupport is being made by an international consortium of developers and designers led by the Media Development Loan Fund's Center for Advanced Media Prague (CAMP) as part of its Campware Initiative. LiveSupport's lead developer is Akos Maroy, who, in addition to being the webmaster for Tilos Radio in Budapest, Hungary, is the author of DarkIce, an open-source streaming tool. He is joined by PHP developers Sebastian Goebel and Tomas Hlava. LiveSupport's functionality specification and input on real-world applications in radio was written by Robert Klajn, the sound engineer for Radio B92 in Belgrade, Serbia. Project coordination iis being handled by Micz Flor of Redaktion und Alltag, a Berlin-based web publishing house. LiveSupport's user interface is being designed by a team from the New York's Parsons Institute of Design's Design and Technology Department, led by chair Colleen Macklin and IT Director Kunal Jain, with master of fine arts candidates Catalin Lazia, Turi McKinley, Sangita Shah and Charles Truett. The team has focused on building use-case scenarios for LiveSupport's features, as a way of providing better grouping of software functions and the interfaces for them. Funding for LiveSupport has been generously provided by a grant from the Open Society Institute's Information Program, through its ICT Toolsets initiative.
On december 26 2004 I received an e-mail from Andy Olivares who pointed me to his emuSICK Project (the same day it saw its first release). About this, he writes on its website: "emuSICK is a multiplatform radio automation system based in HardData DineSat product. This project has been created entirely in C++ and QT from Trolltech. For the sound engine we have selected the greatest sound engine we could find. I'm talking about FMOD project. (...) As this project is based on QT's API it is multiplatform, so you should be able to compile and use it under Windows, Linux, Machintosh and any other OS supported by the QT Framework and FMOD library." So this looks like another project on a very interesting path!
Can it be true? Are we almost there? Robert Ambrose, General Manager of KTNA in Talkeetna, Alaska, today (june 23 2004) mailed this: "Hi. Saw your site. Have you checked out Rivendell? I just got this at a small community station and am committed to replacing the windoze based network and broadcast software with open source. Rivendell seems to be the most complete package." Really looks very promising! Check it out, I'd recommend! They describe themselves as: "Rivendell aims to be a complete radio broadcast automation solution, with the facilities for the acquisition, management, scheduling and playout of audio content. As a robust, functionally complete digital audio system for broadcast radio applications, Rivendell uses industry standard components like the GNU/Linux Operating System, the AudioScience HPI Driver Architecture and the MySQL Database Engine. Rivendell is being developed under the GNU Public License.".
Head of software development for Rivendell is Frederick Gleason Jr.
Interesting point: Rivendell comes out of the salemradiolab, which is a part of Salem. Salem says about itself: "Salem Communications Corporation is the leading provider of radio programming, online resources and magazines targeted to the Christian and family themes audience. For over 25 years our core business has been the ownership and operation of radio stations in major U.S. markets."
On their support page I read: "Support is currently only available for radio stations owned and operated by Salem Communications Corporation." Does this mean, we have here a whole network of radios, being run with a GNU/GPL radio broadcast automation solution?
Then we have here the italian Soma Project: "The object of the technical research was a digital environment, which could let individuals or whole communities gain access to a common schedule with resumes, repetitions, deferred programs, live broadcastings, regular broadcastings as one national and international network. Soma could satisfy this need and could be easly managed through the web thanks to somadmin, which could update the soma admin in real time."
another italian project: Znap. "Znap is a small c/python network mixing daemon. It can load streams supported by fmod library (ogg/mp3/wav...) and mix them together. Can be controlled via Tcp or XmlRpc. Future releases will provide playlist/db and scheduling capabilities making it able to act like a radio automation software."
Jason Schindler of the "Stewie Radio Automation Project" just (june 20 2004) wrote: "I was just emailing you again to let you know that I have a much more usable version available for download now at this URL."
~~David A. Gatwood is making progress with SongCue, a set of programs, which will one day maybe fullfill almost all needs...~~
Free Radio J (sic!) lives at sourceforge as well and wants do all in Java (J!). Recently released first files!
~~Guinever / Arthur have their home at sourceforge as well and want to do it in Visual Basic for the win-platform. No files released yet.~~
~~Radio Free Linux wants to do it in Perl, is at home in sourceforge-town, and has no files released yet either.~~
Geek Radio uses mainly PHP to set up a browser-controllable Radio that even reads out News etc. automatically with a computerized voice. Pretty geeky!
~~Radio Linux is an italian project, aiming at the same as r.o.s.s. and shares its fact that it has not released any files yet...~~
~~AutoPlay DJ works with Perl and Java, lives at sourceforge, and has no files released yet~~
~~Vibecast looks very promising as well - and has files released last time about a year ago... that you can get via CVS, others result in error 404.~~
AutoRadio resides at sourceforge, wants to run on Win2000, feeding from C++, Visual Basic and ASP, looks like it is of swiss origin, as it is related with Radio M24.ch.
Now MuSE sounds definitively like something to try. They write about themselves: "MuSE is an application for the mixing, encoding, and network streaming of sound. MuSE can simultaniously mix up to 6 encoded audio bitstreams (from files or network) plus a souncard input signal. The resulting stream can be played locally on the sound card and/or encoded as an mp3 bitstream sended to a broadcast server. MuSE offers an intuitive interface to be operated realtime and can run in "batch" mode or receiving remote commands thru network."
Then Ricky Thomas pointed me to Radio Free Asias's Broadcast Open Development Exchange Initiative, which claims to be "an open plattform to freely exchange information and technical development for the professional broadcast community". And further down they say: "Radio Free Asia (RFA) was created by the U.S. government (...) RFA is a 100% digital facility in Washington D.C. (...)". They have an impressing list of free software available! really worth checking out! a small starting point to what i wrote down in Vision...
Grant Petersen had another very helpful link: The Unattended Broadcasting System, UBS. This comes from WMHD 90.7 FM which is a student run organization and broadcast facility on the campus of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, IN. Grant is not involved in it, but says, UBS is an active project and - after his trials - considers it working.
Tom Brook pointed me to his FRUK, Free Radio UK, Site. Although running on Windows ;-), this selfdescription sounds very promising: "Free Radio UK (FRUK) originally started as a private online radio station for a group of internet users who shared the same tastes in music. As interests grew of how the system could be modified and enhanced, FRUK evolved to develop software to remotely run the radio station, and to automate the entire process if there wasn't a DJ available." And, yes, there is a free version. But it has its own non-GPL-licence.
AGNULA, the once EU-financed project for a GNU/Linux Audio distribution says about itself: AGNULA's main task will be the development of two reference distributions for the GNU/Linux operating system completely based on Free Software (i.e. under a FSF approved Free Software license) and completely devoted to professional and consumer audio applications and multimedia development. One distribution will be Debian-based (DeMuDi) and the other will be Red Hat-based (ReHMuDi). Both will be available on the network for download and on CD.

The following table should give a first idea, where the holes are, concerning radio, if looked at the elements individually:

use status link

MP3 encoders existing List of these

CD-ripper existing link

DBMS existing mySQL

audio recorder existing List of these

audio editor existing List of these

multitrack harddisk recorder and editor kind of existing List of these
Audacity, the GNU GPL multiplatform (linux, freebsd, windows, macos, osx) multitrack (unlimited tracks) harddiskeditor / -recorder

scheduler coming in as a part of SongCue

clock editor, setting the rules for the scheduler inexistent no link

realtime mp3-mixer existing Emixer (not eXmixer)
DBMix (Wow!!!)
GDAM looks good as well!
mixplayd is a daemon that can be told to play mp3/2 files using mpg123 and be controlled via telnet - looks very promising for the problem of crossfading between songs!

frontend for on-air-studio(s) coming Exmixer (see below) and
SongCue

frontend for production studio(s) coming SongCue

interface to multiline studio-mixer
or a digital alternative great! it's almost there!!!! Exmixer (not emixer) found via dbmix - see a little further up. Exmixer is an external Box with analog Faders to control the digital software-mixer DBMix. We are getting closer!!!! There are two pictures of Simon Werners exmixer. The outside, and the inside.

logger inexistent -

satellite interface inexistent -

varia others that come close to our needs, but miss some basics for "real" radio existent Paloma rips, manages and plays
DigitalDJ is an SQL-based mp3-player frontend. This looks very nice!
Mp3 Commander is a program for searching and playing mp3 collections.
The GlobeCom Jukebox is the perfect tool to coordinate your music. rips, manages and plays etc. has Webinterface. Description sounds great! Has accounts.
Jukebox is a nifty Jukebox-system based on mySQL, apache and perl with a Webinterface. Serves a lot of songs in a german internetcaffe at Regensburg, north of Munich.

use	status	link
MP3 encoders	existing	List of these
CD-ripper	existing	link
DBMS	existing	mySQL
audio recorder	existing	List of these
audio editor	existing	List of these
multitrack harddisk recorder and editor	kind of existing	List of these Audacity, the GNU GPL multiplatform (linux, freebsd, windows, macos, osx) multitrack (unlimited tracks) harddiskeditor / -recorder
scheduler	coming in	as a part of SongCue
clock editor, setting the rules for the scheduler	inexistent	no link
realtime mp3-mixer	existing	Emixer (not eXmixer) DBMix (Wow!!!) GDAM looks good as well! mixplayd is a daemon that can be told to play mp3/2 files using mpg123 and be controlled via telnet - looks very promising for the problem of crossfading between songs!
frontend for on-air-studio(s)	coming	Exmixer (see below) and SongCue
frontend for production studio(s)	coming	SongCue
interface to multiline studio-mixer or a digital alternative	great! it's almost there!!!!	Exmixer (not emixer) found via dbmix - see a little further up. Exmixer is an external Box with analog Faders to control the digital software-mixer DBMix. We are getting closer!!!! There are two pictures of Simon Werners exmixer. The outside, and the inside.
logger	inexistent	-
satellite interface	inexistent	-
varia others that come close to our needs, but miss some basics for "real" radio	existent	Paloma rips, manages and plays DigitalDJ is an SQL-based mp3-player frontend. This looks very nice! Mp3 Commander is a program for searching and playing mp3 collections. The GlobeCom Jukebox is the perfect tool to coordinate your music. rips, manages and plays etc. has Webinterface. Description sounds great! Has accounts. Jukebox is a nifty Jukebox-system based on mySQL, apache and perl with a Webinterface. Serves a lot of songs in a german internetcaffe at Regensburg, north of Munich.

Existing commercial solutions

There are a lot! Because more or less every radio needs an automation this is a pretty big market. Here are just a few ones:

A long List of Automation Systems, that most have a scheduler with them
A not so long list of schedulers only
A Big German Player in the field, Management Data Media Systems, who by mid-july 2001 announced its bancruptcy

We still have a long way to go! You have some input / idea / link / any other suggestion?
Contact me, Patrik Tschudin, at ptschudin@users.sourceforge.net

Things I am involved in:
Radio X, a small community radio in Basel, Switzerland, of which I am a co-founder
in.f.a.m. mediaburo, a collective of professional freelance journalists
swiss public radio drs2, the arts and culture channel - that's the guys who pay my rent for the work I do at a program about cultural and scientific news, called DRS2aktuell

and by the way: if you use the Sourceforge search and look for "radio" and "automation" you'll find others who have similar plans

Vision

All clever minds around radio and GNU/linux (or any other free software) put together their knowledge, each according to his / her capabilities, and - initially funded by a group of public broadcasters from all over the world (who fight with their proprietary automation systems a lot too) - create a scalable, secure, flexible, adaptable (etc. pp.) free, open source based radio automation system. Why "public broadcasters"? They might have more experience in shareing ressources and information, not being direct competitors against each other, than private players do. And they have a kind of obligation to serve the public. Why not once on a (radio-)technical level?

News

Now finally there is something! Using and hacking around with mixplayd and Jukebox I got my webbased jukebox doing sensible overlapping of songs. If you dare, you can get the necessary files HERE. But really beware, you have been warned! This is only a messy, unclean first release, full of german variables and Radio X specifics, meant more to prove that there is something moving here than to offer an out-of-the-box-solution!!! expect many changes soon. but look at it - if you really have to...

To be honest: I am amazed that already 319 downloads of my "messy" release happened... up to now (june 9 2004).

interesting Articles

LinuxJournal: Helping Broadcast Radio with Linux
WiKi, started in the aftermath of the above article: RadioStation/ -- Linux-controlled broadcast radio station system

Maybe, if you come down to here and you found something useful, maybe you want to make a small donation? I won't stop you... And don't be surprised: at paypal i registered using my "official" e-mailadress.