Welcome to the Bawdry project.
This project aims to create a plug-and-go box which provides a simple way for cafes and restaurants to host an online radio station playing within their WiFi network. The music playing on this radio station will be provided by local musicians themselves.
Why Bawdry? I would like to work in some music and audio community collaboration along the lines of Blogging, and so the phrase you get when you combine "Web" and "Audio" sounds kind of like Bawdry. Bawdry things are often censored, of course, which makes the name more appealing since censorship of music is something I hope this project can help to alleviate. Plus, asking someone to put up a "Bawdry Box" sounds uber-cool.
Sample usage cases:
- A musician visits the cafe and uploads several tracks from their CD. The files are added to the rotation on the radio station automatically.
- A cafe hosts a band and records their performance. After the performance is done, the music is uploaded to the radio station and added to the live playlist.
The software used will be first and foremost all open source software (OSS), and will use no proprietary software with licensing requirements. The system will be created on a Linux distribution (TBD), therefore, and will utilize OGG vorbis over MP3, which is encumbered by patents.
The process will be as follows:
- musician uploads audio file (in any of several formats) via a web page hosted on the radio machine
- file is leveled using software like SoX.
- file is transcoded to OGG using Vorbis Software
- file is added to Icecast playlist and streamed live
- listener tunes into radio station and plays audio stream, possibly downloading and installing OGG player from radio server first.
- listener rates the song, makes comments
- at the end of the month the top ten songs are burnt to CD and sold out of the cafe, enriching both cafe owner and musicians
Software Involved:
Icecast (http://www.icecast.org/)
OGG Vorbis (http://xiph.org/ogg/)
Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org, http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ or http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html)
Apache Webserver (http://www.apache.org/)
Postgres (http://www.postgres.org/)
I prefer to use a Debian-based distro, like Ubuntu or Gentoo, or even raw Debian. (gentoo is not debian based)
Here is what I plan to do to build it BawdryBuildInstructions