The Ninux community, under the umbrella of Freifunk, developed four awesome open-source projects for the Google Summer of Code program 2011: a front-end for RadioMate, a new mapserver (called nodeshot), a video and chat extension to the social networking engine Diaspora* and a new tunneling tool.
In this post I will write about RadioMate, the project I was involved in. Then posts on the other projects will follow!
There are many web-radio projects that are closely involved in the world of Community Networks: in Rome Fusoradio and Radio Sonar are an active part of the community and relay on the ninux network for their streaming, in Leipzig Radio Blau (which transmits also in FM) gives big spaces to the Freifunk project, or RadioCona in Ljubljana, where the Wlan Slovenija project is based.
Often these web radios have to relay on closed-source software platforms as the available open-source solutions don’t fit their needs.
RadioMate is a free (as in freedom) community-wise Web-radio management system. Some of its features are:
- support of multiple users with different privileges (roles)
- easy radio schedule management
- handling of audio files and playlists
- extendable with new types of transmissions
- interface with the icecast server
- takeover of the radio streaming in case of “special editions”
While last year the RadioMate engine was developed, this year our efforts focused on a Web frontend. You can find a demo at radiomate.ninux.org. The username is “foobar” while the password is “secret”. Point also your player (e.g. VLC) at radiomate.ninux.org:8000.
For the techies, the engine is based on liquidsoap, written in Python, and easily extendable through liquidsoap scripts. It exports a JSON API which is exploited by the Javascript (jQuery) based Web frontend. Source code and documentation can be found at radiomate.org.
Of course there is still work to do, but I hope that this software will be soon used by our friends running webradios!
As we say in Rome:Daje!
Clauz
