ARP Radio

I built ARP Radio as a platform for myself and some friends to broadcast live DJ Sets. The site comprises of the following main components.

[Azuracast] (liquidsoap back end) – This is the software used for live streaming audio and also for managing the radio station’s channels, streamers and to manage offline broadcasts, ie. broadcasting past shows when the radio is not live. This software is open source and available on [github]. Azuracast runs in a docker container on my VPS which is running Ubuntu Server 20.04.

[Unrealircd] – I wanted to setup a chat on the site and looked at different options available, being an advocate of IRC and still using this platform I opted for a fully fledged ircd to run the chat back end, this means that people can connect to the chat using various different options, they can use any irc client or they can use the web chat that I also installed and setup and embedded onto the sites main page. I used [KiwiIRC] for the web chat and edited the styling slightly to suit my page. With a lot of the IRC community moving over to Discord I also setup a chat on Discord and setup a bot to relay chat messages between Discord and the ircd server. I have also setup a bot for the ircd using [Limnoria] (supybot fork) which is capable of performing various tasks such as, announcing who is broadcasting and how many listeners are tuned in, snarfing url’s, announcements, moderation tasks, etc. There are many plugins available on github for Limnoria and more plugins can be written in python so this is a very modular bot with lots of capabilities.

The front end – I am not a designer by any means, I prefer to spend my time at the command line making things work so when it came to creating a front end I looked at different options again and thanks to a good friend of mine Andy, I was convinced that the easiest way to create a nice front end website that would be responsive and functional but also easy to add to and update was to use WordPress. My friend Andy did the design and created the theme and templates and I helped with the technical stuff such as installing WordPress, creating a mySQL database for WordPress, bringing in all the modules from Azuracast, KiwiIRC and embedding and styling them to work with the theme.

ARP Radio can be found here – [https://arpradio.com]