Line In & live MIC - Airtime Support Discussions on Sourcefabric Forum

Adam Troman

Hi,

I plan on installing Airtime, it looks fantastic, although I'm struggling to get my head around how the physical connections should be configured.

My plan is to have a mixing desk with 2 mics which is also connected to a live DJ mixer, CDJs etc.

Firstly, does the system support a line input back from the mixer? How does everyone else set this up for live talk over?
The same would apply for when we have a live mix?

Do I need a second server to take an audio output from the mixing desk:

Audio Out from Airtime server to and input to desk
Audio Out from CD Decks and input to desk
Mic into desk

Audio out of desk to separate machine which will upload to Icecast? (PC running edcast)?

Thanks

hoerich

Hi Adam,

there are plenty of discussions about workarounds on board. just search for line-in, live-input or similar.

there is also a discussion where some users explain their setup

http://forum.sourcefabric.org/discussion/15584/here-is-my-setupwhat-is-your-setup-and-how-can-i-improve-mine/p1

if you visit the bug-tracker http://dev.sourcefabric.org , you can search for feature requests for variuos line-in-features and vote for them.

http://dev.sourcefabric.org/browse/CC-5253

http://dev.sourcefabric.org/browse/CC-1956

Metadata is a different topic.

I am lucky to run a station in Austria, where community radios don't have to provide playout-histories atm.

This is on roadmap

cheers

Nat Persaud

Hi Adam, welcome to Airtime.

Currently Airtime cannot take an analog input and schedule it to play out on the output stream. The only way to get live content into Airtime is to send your mixer output to an Icecast client and then connect that client to Airtime as a source (ie stream in).

Adam Troman

Ok, I thought that might be the case.

Messy! - I'll need to be able to drop the level on the audio to talk over...

I guess the other option is to line out of the Airtime server into the mixer then use another pc to upstream to my icecast server...

I'll lose all the meta data from the tracks though :-(

I can't be the first person to ask this??

How have other stations done it?

Thanks

Nat Persaud

Adam,

You mentioned a DJ setup going into your mixer. You won't have metadata from that through Airtime.

I am in a similar situation and I chose to put Airtime pre-mixer as well. I have a seperate linux box that just runs Darkice.

Another option is to encode your mixer output and send it to Airtime as I said. You can do all your live stuff in analog. The only possible issue would be latency. I was also thinking, what if you ran your icecast client and an icecast server on the same machine as Airtime. Then Airtime could grab that stream via localhost whenever you have it scheduled. It's basically extending Airtime to take a live input.

Voisses Tech · Post edited by Voisses Tech at 2013-09-12 18:32:27

So here is my thoughts on line input

typically one would want a talk over scenario which would be like this

duck when the mike is live

a total cut for live in put

fade down when the mike becomes live

But IMHO lets look at what Airtime is designed for

Remote broadcasting in a remote server

So IMHO all processing should be done at the broadcast studio then submit to the server to be consume by client

but if you have a local studio situation as per @Adam Troman

what i have found is that an easy way to achieve all of the above is to have

Airtime (Global settings line Out to Mixer)===> Mixer ===> transmitter/
                                                                        ===> encoder ===> stream server/different
                                                                                                               - mount on Icecast
basically reversing how most of how we do it now
You could even pipe the meta tags from the Airtime or use another airtime on the other end

All the scripts I tested for a live local studio situation just create redundant task to things Airtime already do

V.O.I.S.S.E.S.

Ashworth Payne

Hello

I've recently been considering a return to airtime and have needs similar to yours. After learning to script in liquidsoap, i've concluded that the best workflow is to put a liquidsoap helper script between airtime and the stream servers.

This should be helpful. It has an input harbor... point airtime to that. It also has fallback... you need to change the directories. And, it listens to input on alsa.

It prioritizes thusly:
Alsa input is highest priority.
Airtime is second.
Random play is last.

10 seconds of silence forces a transition, with fades, and jingle insertion. Random play also includes random jingles at 20-minute intervals.

This allows you to do what you wish, without having to worry about it being clobbered after an airtime update.

And now, an appeal: I've been unemployed for months. I'm broke and spiraling toward financial ruin. If you find this script useful, please consider a small donation (link at www.backroomradio.com). The funds will be used to purchase food.

Voisses Tech

"And now, an appeal: I've been unemployed for months. I'm broke and spiraling toward financial ruin. If you find this script useful, please consider a small donation (link at www.backroomradio.com). The funds will be used to purchase food."

Do not think this is the right forum to do this.but I might suggest that you place something on your website and facebook.

Do you have a paypal or similar that fror donation,? Let me know.

In the meantime might I suggest that find if you can volunteer at some organization,institution or company,etc.where even the food aspect can be taken care of.

I do sympathize

Ps. as a open source developer ,I do feel your code should totally free and not have any redirects.

V.O.I.S.S.E.S
Can you hear me now

Ashworth Payne

I posted working code. Download it. Use it. Hack it up if you want. But, don't sympathize with me. I can't eat sympathy.

hoerich

Voisses Tech said:
"And now, an appeal: I've been unemployed for months. I'm broke and spiraling toward financial ruin. If you find this script useful, please consider a small donation (link at www.backroomradio.com). The funds will be used to purchase food."

Do not think this is the right forum to do this.but I might suggest that you place something on your website and facebook.

I think it's ok that Ashworth mentioned this as a sidenote. He was just asking for a donation.
But please don't flame on each other onboard. No need for sympathy neither ;-) but don't become personal.
cheers

Ashworth Payne

I keep seeing people ask for the same features over and over again. The devs have done a great job of making a system that handles liquidsoap requests. It does great things. Personally, I'd rather it didn't require postgres monit whatever-else, but on a fairly robust machine, Airtime does a good job.

It really needs fallback to a directory or playlist though.

My script handles that and a whole lot more.

You don't have to edit Airtime files. You can update airtime and the music will still be playing. Because my script sits between airtime and shoutcast/icecast. If airtime has a problem and crashes,music will still play.

Whats more:
You can take input from alsa. If you have a mixer going into your soundcard (or even better, have a nice audio interface), my script will transition to the mixer feed as soon as it detects audio (you don't have to do anything but mute mute mute). But here is the kicker: It will fade the source out before transitioning to your live-feed. When you're ready to go live, just turn up the volume and start talking: its all automatically buffered and encoded.
And....
When there is no audio on the input for 10 seconds (you can change this.. see note 1below), it plays a jingle, then falls back to airtime... if airtime is not playing anything out, it goes back to random play.

During random play, random jingles are played every 20 minutes. You can change this too.

The easiest way to think of it is:
There are three sources, and they are prioritized:
1. Audio-in
2. Airtime
3. Random play

You can change the priority so that airtime is number 1. If its not playing anything out, the script plays a jingle and changes to audio-in. If there is not audio-in signal, it falls back to random play.

You have two options for remote dj's: You can give them slots in airtime, where they will be time-limited, or you can give them a login to my script instead, and they can be pilled-into the "priority stack" however you wish.

But wait... there's more!

You can post meta-data directly to my script and it will be inserted into the stream. So if a DJ is live, using CD's/tape/whatever, he/she can still update metadata. And if you're sick of stream-rippers, just update the metadata at odd intervals... they will go away.

Furthermore: if you recompile liquidsoap and include last.fm support, get yourself a last.fm account and scrobble all your metadata (my script already does this part). Then pull that into your stations website: instant album art. Go to www.backroomradio.com to see it in action... its a simple plugin for wordpress.

I banged my head against liquidsoap for months. I've done all the work for you. Actually, i've done most of the work for you, because the script needs a few tweaks to get running. I love hacking around in liquidsoap... I've got multiband compression, peak limiting, and kinds of silly stuff going on... and i can tweak those in real-time from my tablet (with TouchOSC).

One last thing that needs to be said: if you're mixing and running Airtime locally, you don't need darkice or any of that. You already have liquidsoap installed so use it. I'll be happy to help you out if you can help me out: i'm !@#$ing hungry people (had a promising job interview today, but I've had a hundred promising job interviews lately so whatever).

Note 1: If you have a spare mono channel on your mixer and a noise source: hook that up. Turn the fader down on that channel so that the noise can't be heard in the stream, but keeps the console live. In my script, you can actually set the silence threshold in decibels, along with the length-of-silence to watch for. With careful level adjustment, you can solo an empty channel (silence the entire board) and force near-instant transition to the other sources (airtime or random play)

John Chewter · Post edited by John Chewter at 2013-09-18 03:04:19

I think it should have been posted in the new 'users hacks' section (which I cannot find) and a request for a donation for that is seems perfectly acceptable to me. Airtime has a paid Airtime Pro version, which does has different code and they certainly do ask for money. This is not a competion product - it is an enhancement.

hoerich

@Ashworth: Had a quick look at your script. Nice work!

John Chewter said:
I think it should have been posted in the new 'users hacks' section (which I cannot find) and a request for a donation for that is seems perfectly acceptable to me.

New forum category "Airtime Hacks" is on its way.
Sourcefabric-Team is at Sourcecamp this week, so I guess we'll have to wait for next week.

cheers

Albert FR

@John+Chewter propose yours services to sourcefabric
they perhaps need someone

Voisses Tech

I was outta town and as I read the answer to the comment I made,I shook my head.

You all miss the point.

Please go back and read what I said.

First i ask do you have a paypal or other forms of payment receipt method ?

So that I and others could have a way to make the donation requested

Secondly I commented on the wrong forum

I felt this forum was design to help people with airtime related problem.Now I see I am totally wrong,based on the comments of all who said they see nothing wrong with that.

Maybe most of us have not being in forums where spammers take over.Please do not get me wrong I am not indicating that @Ashworth Payne is a spammers.

Solution

I think the solution would be to create a section that anyone can ask for anything else,so if I have a kick start project or whatever can mention it there

Thirdly

I commented that one should not put code in a script that redirects anyone to there site.

Joomla extensions had people doing that at the start,Now they require you to explicitly states that you have a redirect before your extensions is accepted.

Part of the code is taken from James Harrison script,by no way he did that for none of the scripts he wrote in rivendell or the OPB he wrote.

Most programmer put in a comment at the top of the script with all their information,Please look at what Happyworm does with his script.

@ Ashworth Payne stand that the script is to be hack by anyone and used it whatever way.Most help at times here are for Newbies and they expect us to be fair and not sending traffic to our site.Newbies may not even want to do much hacking or changes but adopt the script or instructions.

Just to note the Heading of this script is "Line In & live MIC" and I compare this to a person selling you the thing you want but telling you oh you ought to take this too. Focus on what your customer wants.

@John Chewter comments "Airtime has a paid Airtime Pro version, which does has different code and they certainly do ask for money." rattles my nerve.

This is the foundation of Open Source. Developer make a program that is usable and of great assistance to the public and then as people ask for more individual features,you get these feature and offer them for a paid versions.

This is what Google does,this is what most developers does REd5,Rtmp server,Rivendell etc.Its how you as an individual make your money by adding to the code so that your client will enjoy it.

Here is how I would use airtime pro.If I have 10 stations remotely ,I can use it as my switching station.This is exactly what I had being doing with my paid host.

Finally, I have no time to be sympathetic to anyone who say they are Hungry.I only have solutions to feed that person.I offer that solution to @Ashworth Payne.

I am a person who help with hunger in the world,my daily job is with a 501(c)(3) charitable donation organisation and I feed people in the subway, around the world, on the street etc.Please before you assert read what I said .

I am there to give you the first fish but also teach you to fish so that you further can fish for your.

I will take it on my self to pen a section help asking for help rather than put it in one of I write to help others.

I rest my case.

V.O.I.S.S.E.S

Can You Hear Me Now

hoerich

I can't understand the riot...

Ashworth Payne

no good deed goes unpunished.

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