blobcode - internet radio with icecast and liquidsoap

This is a quick guide on setting up a personal internet radio station. Note that this assumes you have a realtively mainstream linux vps (this tutorial will be using debian, but feel free to substitute distro of choice).

a note on audio

This guide will assume that you have audio files placed in a liquidsoap-compatible format in /usr/share/music, although feel free to substitute this directory for whatever is convienent (and hopefully FHS compliant).

icecast

Icecast is the service in this setup that actually broadcasts our audio from an internal source. The first step is to set up and install an icecast server - you can find releases here. Once you have the package installed, open /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml. Here you should change the default password for both source, relay and admin-user, and keep track of them for later. We can also tweak settings such as the max number of users here. Once you’re done, you can start icecast with systemctl icecast2 start and `systemctl icecast2 enable’.

You can now check that the server is running at <server-address>:8000.

liquidsoap

liquidsoap is the audio provider for this setup, allowing for you to create and customize your audio stream. Once installed, you will need to create a .liq file for your stream. A common location is at /bin/liquidsoap/. We’ll be creating a file /bin/liquidsoap/main.liq.

In main.liq, we can now start to create our station programming. We’ll be working with something fairly basic, but feel free to take a look at the liquidsoap docs for inspiration. Replace the contents of main.liq with

music = playlist("/usr/share/music")

radio = mksafe(random([music]))

# Stream it out
output.icecast(%mp3.vbr,
host = "localhost", port = 8000,
password = "<ICECAST SOURCE PASSWORD>", mount = "stream.mp3",
name = "very cool name", description = "description",
radio)

This is a very basic server, with no fallback audio that randomly streams audio from the /usr/share/music folder (recursively) in an mp3 format.

Note that at this point, due to the inane number of issues encountered running liquidsoap-daemon, we will be running our own service. Create a file named main.sh in /bin/liquidsoap, with the following contents

#!/bin/bash 
liquidsoap /bin/liquidsoap/main.liq

now create a service file for liquidsoap in /lib/systemd/system/liquidsoap.service with the following

[Unit]
Description=liquidsoap

[Service]
User=<non-root user>
ExecStart=/bin/liquidsoap/main.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and now you can get the service going with systemctl enable liquidsoap & systemctl start liquidsoap. At this point the audio stream should be available at http://<server-address>:8000/stream.mp3. From here, you can stream from a local client or setup a web-based streaming setup.