Radio MCAD Broadcast Automator

Radio MCAD’s calendar-based broadcast automation system is easy for volunteers/students to use, yet flexible enough to broadcast live from any georgraphic location. This system uses two servers and some shell scripts to combine the power of SAM Broadcaster, iTunes XML Playlists, and K5N’s WebCalendar for round-the-clock broadcasting.

An Icecast daemon provided the MP3 and OGG streaming interface for online listeners.

Shown below, all the elements that tie it together:

Radio.mcad.edu live feed lets you know what’s currently playing:

The Webcalendar interface schedules playlists from Radio MCAD’s iTunes library to play at specific times. Most playlists are arranged in 30, 60, or 120 minute increments. A cron job and some PHP shell scripts trigger SAM Broadcaster’s playback.

Audio playback is executed by SAM Broadcaster, pulling audio over the network from the iTunes Library server. It’s important to know that iTunes does not actually play audio over the broadcast. SAM allows us to crossfade between pre-recorded sets and live streams, even allowing for in-studio preview. This ran on a donated 1GHz Windows box.

The iTunes Libary where all the media is properly tagged and organized. This ran on an older 400MHz G4 tower with a 250GB backup drive. We chose to use iTunes for its simplicity, XML interface, and accessibly to student volunteers. Plus, it was free.

We used Nicecast and a powerbook to send live source audio to the SAM Broadcaster server back in the studio. We always referred to this handy helper as “Radio Friend”. Stations with a budget would use a studio-transmitter-link, but we used 802.11b and MP3.

The live event, streamed over wi-fi to the entire world! Woo hoo!