This looks like the proper area to post this. B)

OK, first, pleased to note that airtime installed mostly painlessly on ubuntu 14.04-4 and was able to connect to an existing, external icecast2 stream.  I noticed that a number of people have been trying to install Airtime on a Raspberry Pi, I'll probably watch those attempts with baited breathe.  ;)  And that's where things here diverge from a standard install / application of Airtime.

In this case, I am working on modifying Airtime to control a Pi and its playlists, and not just audio, but video, as well.  The Pi appliance works very well, the major hurdle at this moment was a program manager.  For a disclosure, the appliance's project page is here https://github.com/krattai/AEBL and the blog for the appliance is here http://aeblm2.blogspot.ca/ for those who are curious.

I don't want to have this end up being a huge, initial post, so I'll try to summarize, yet still touch on some the major points for feedback.

First, the installation for this hack will end up being a virtual machine, as it is specific purpose and needs to be easy for people to install / use, "out of the box".  In that regard, the appliance (VM) will be zeroconf and IPv6 enabled, in order to auto discover devices that it will be controlling.  If anyone has any feedback on experiences using Airtime in a virtualbox installation, it would be interesting to hear.

Next, I initially came to the forums here, because I was looking for any references to remote storage successes.  There's a few reasons for this, partly because the AEBL devices themselves will contain content that this application of Airtime should be able to reference in scheduling.  I've browsed a few of the discussions on this subject, and did not see any resolutions on quick skimming.  Again, if anyone has any feedback on this, it would be great, otherwise I'll have to look at adding that as a feature for this hack.  Just as a point of interest, the AEBL appliances are essentially Internet of Things devices (don't get me started on that ridiculous name) and form their own cloud of content, so mapping public content (yes, copyright issues are very much in focus, here) is part of the interest in externally mapping content for Airtime, as will be the private content, in regards to sharing to private groups / subscribers.

Third, is regarding streaming.  Maybe I'm missing it, but I haven't found a way to add an external stream to the schedule.  Even though I was able to successfully connect the icecast2 server on an AEBL device to Airtime, I'm not sure I'm real clear on the concept.  I'd partly expected to be able to set an external stream to an Airtime schedule, although I certainly can see how a remote device (ie. AEBL) could playback an Airtime stream.  Any insight into this would be welcome, as to how an external stream source works within Airstream.

Second lastly would be daisy chaining.  The AEBL appliance is itself a media playback and streaming device which utilizes the concept of channels.  Each device is potentially its own channel, if the owner of the device wants to publish their own content and others want to subscribe to that channel.  I'm looking at a number of ways to accomplish that.  Part of what I'm hoping to accomplish with Airtime is to augment that function.  At first glance, it appeared that Airtime's decentralized concept might help in that regard, although again, maybe I'm not clear about Airtime's core abilities.  If anyone could provide thoughts on using Airtime to stream to an external device, which would in turn rebroadcast that content (ie. an artist is using Airstream to master a live show, which is then picked up by their AEBL appliance, for rebroadcast on their AEBL's channel), it would be much appreciated.

And now for the most non-standard part.  The AEBL device was originally developed as a generation advancement of a prior appliance, which was actually a video playback device.  Think digital sign on steroids.  The audio aspects were an afterthought, but are of more interest to me.  That said, I'll be adding video programming functionality and possibly streaming capabilities to Airtime.  If anyone has any knowledge of attempts to do this, I'd love to hear about it.  Ultimately, Airtime will create the playlist schedule for the AEBL devices as a primary function, and anything else is, at least at this point in time, just an afterthought.  But there certainly could be a huge potential that will probably be explored at a later date.

I look forward to any feedback, suggestions, etc. on this.

Cheers,

Kevin