The Radio Jabi Project

The Radio Jabi Project

The History

Back when I was at university, I produced a student-led webcast once a week. It wasn’t the most-watched show in the world—with viewing figures in the tens rather than the thousands—but while doing it, I learned a tremendous amount about setting up, producing, and hosting live programming.

Later, shortly after we got a new principal, I was asked if I knew anything about setting up a radio station. At the time, my only radio experience was a weekly one-hour slot on YouthComm Radio back when I was a teenager. I had no idea of the legalities and only a rough grasp of the technical side, but I took on the project as a great opportunity to learn something new.

I priced up all the equipment, researched the necessary college licenses, and found sources for a music library. Surprisingly, it wasn't all that expensive—especially when compared to the cost of a live video broadcast. I submitted my findings, but I didn't hear anything back from the higher-ups, and that was the last I thought about it.

That was the case until a couple of weeks ago. While training for my new job, someone mentioned how great it would be if there were a "work radio," and it reminded me of that original plan. When I had some spare time, I looked into what it would take to set up a simple internet radio station.

The Setup

A traditional radio setup would require a studio, a USB audio mixer, microphones, CD/MP3 players, media servers, a broadcast server, and other bits of technical "glue" to hold it all together.

However, there is another way: using a laptop, a cloud server, and a USB microphone. I couldn't believe my luck—I could set this up in my office for little to no cost and have my very own internet radio station.

The first thing I looked into was the playout software (used to play music, jingles, and adverts). I came across a few open-source solutions that run on a Linux server in the cloud. I ended up choosing Mopidy for two reasons:

1. It is simple to use and has a layout similar to Spotify (and coincidentally, it can also use Spotify as a music source).
2. The other software packages I tested managed to crash the tiny AWS server I was using. A larger server likely would have handled them fine, but I was limited by my 12-month free tier.

Out of the box, Mopidy isn't meant to broadcast music to the internet—it’s designed to consolidate online music streaming services into one location. I solved this by using IceCast2, an internet streaming server. The beauty of IceCast2 is that you can set it up to maintain a constant stream that can be interrupted by another source without breaking the stream for the listener. This was the perfect solution; I could have a playlist playing 24 hours a day from Spotify and then interrupt it from anywhere to host a live show.

To connect to the streaming server, I use a piece of software called Audio Hijack. It allows me to merge multiple audio sources together and send them to the server. For a basic broadcast, all I need is a USB microphone, VLC Media Player (for adverts and audio clips), and Spotify. If I want to go bigger—with guests or a live band—I would need a USB audio mixer to push an audio feed into Audio Hijack. This setup provides a lot of freedom and is professional enough for any environment.

The best part is that I can schedule DJs from around the world at any time. We just have to ensure the previous DJ has logged off so the next one can log in. Additionally, you can set up as many radio stations as you like with IceCast2, provided your cloud server has the capacity to handle them.