During the Covid 19 lockdown of 2020, I got bored. Very bored indeed, to a level you could not imagine. I could not spend as much time as usual with my young lady, so I had to find something to do to occupy myself. I know from experience that running an online radio station usually involves a ton of work, downloading and importing various shows every week, so I set myself a challenge. That challenge was to create a station which would require no work whatsoever to run, as it would do it all for itself. The result is Max FM, named after a project I was involved with in the mid to late 1990s in Southampton.
The playout system is Competa, from Vector Audio, purely because it is legitimately free, and I have used it before. One of the other benefits of Competa is that it can be programmed to reschedule itself every day, which ticks the box of no work required. However, this is not enough to import new audio from syndicated programmes, which is another goal of this project. This is achieved in a couple of ways - some shows are a defined sequence where Competa just picks a random show each time, such as Bill Clark's Hits and Headlines. Others run in a pre-programmed sequence, such as Clive Brady's Global Funk and Soul show, and the really clever bit works for things like Dance Classics and the Chill Factor, where a batch file downloads the files from their websites, renames them and copies them into places where Competa can find them. If this was not enough, some shows are supplied via Dropbox, such as Hugh Williams' material. These are pulled in with the Dropbox app, then renamed and copied so Competa will find them. News is an hour out of date as I am doing this on the cheap, and Sky Radio News has a free copy available after it has been broadcast live.
To be fair, a lot of this was too easy compared to how I thought it would keep me busy for weeks on end getting everything to work. The biggest problem was actually not the programming but the streaming. Since version 80, Google Chrome, the most used browser in the world at the moment, has by default blocked http content, which is how my home Shoutcast server generates the stream. It seems that Icecast copes with this easier than Shoutcast, so I have now switched to that, and BUTT as the encoder which makes feeding the now playing information a lot easier too. However, as of 9th May 2020, I can't get the stream to work in https, hence the need to use an external player such as Winamp or Windows Media Player, or an insecure browser like Tor. I am still working on this, so fingers crossed I find an answer soon.