Liquidsoap 0.3.0 review
DownloadLiquidsoap is a powerful tool for building complex audio streaming systems, typically targetting internet radios
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Liquidsoap is a powerful tool for building complex audio streaming systems, typically targetting internet radios. Liquidsoap consists of a simple script language, which has a first-class notion of source (basically a stream) and provides elementary source constructors and source compositions from which you can build the streamer you want. This design makes liquidsoap flexible and easily extensible.
We believe that liquidsoap is easy to use. For basic uses, the scripts simply consists of the definition of a tree of sources. It is good to use liquidsoap even for simple streams which could be produced by other tools, because it is extensible: when you want to make your stream more complex, you are still able to stay in the same framework, and your script will remain maintainable. Of course, this will require at some point a deeper understanding of liquidsoap and its scripting language.
If you're new to liquidsoap, you'd probably like to read about the installation procedure and take the quickstart tour. Then you may also enjoy to learn more about the main concepts on which liquidsoap is built. When you'll master these concepts, you'll only need to take a look at the reference (scripting language, API and settings) and get a few ideas from the recipes to be able to design whatever stream you need.
Liquidsoap is written in OCaml and is part of the savonet project.
Here are some key features of "Liquidsoap":
Playing from files, playlists, or script playlists (plays the file chosen by an executable).
Transparent remote file access.
Scheduling of many sources, depending on time, priorities, etc.
Queuing of user requests.
Supports arbitrary transitions: you can have fade, cross-fade, jingle insertion, etc.
Input of other Icecast streams: useful for switching to a live show.
Blank detection.
Multiple outputs in the same instance: you can have several quality settings, use several media or even broadcast several contents from the same instance.
Output to icecast and peercast (mp3/ogg) or a local file (wav/mp3/ogg).
Output to ALSA speaker, input from ALSA microphone. There are some unfixed issues there.
Distributed encoding using RTP.
Arbitrary mixing of several sources together.
Interactive control of many operators via telnet, or indirectly using perl/python scripts, pyGtk GUI (needs an update), web/irc interfaces (not released, mail us)...
Speech and sound synthesis.
What's New in This Release:
Many minor and major fixes at every level!
Conversion of metadata to UTF8.
Got rid of too many threads by scheduling all download tasks in a single thread, and handling all of the server's clients in another single thread.
Simplified the time interval syntax and integrated it to the script language.
New protocol: Wget for FTP, HTTP and HTTPS.
Ability to define a new protocol from the script, typically using an external app/script for resolution, such as bubble.
Ability to use an external app/script for dynamically creating requests.
New on_metadata operator for performing arbitrary actions (typically a call to an external script) when metadata packets occur in a stream.
MP3 encoding, to file or shout.
API renamings and simplification.
Supports transition, as functions of type (source,source) -> source in all switching operators: schedule, random, fallback.
Restart icecast2 outputs on failures.
Major changes to the scripting language which is more uniform and flexible, has functions, a helpful (?) type inference, and a simple Ruby-like syntax.
Timing constraints and synchronization are managed by Root in a centralized way, no more by the many outputs which need it.
Audio decoding is no more based on file extensions, but on the existence of a valid decoder.
Added the equeue operators which allows interactive building of playlists, supporting insertion and moving of queued requests -- queue only allows you to push requests and cancel queued requests.
A Python-Gtk GUI for controlling operators, or more specifically as a console for creating your live show -- to be updated, still unstable.
Alsa input and output.
Blank detection, automatically skips on too long blanks, or strip them.
Http ogg/vorbis relay, the way to relay live shows.
Interactive mixer.
The request system was mostly rewritten to really fulfill its specification.
The server is no more associated to the queue operator but is now something external, in which all operators can plug commands. This much more logical design lead to many more interactive controls. The syntax of command outputs was also simplified for easier automated processing.
Dynamic loading of plugins.
Outputs are now operators. It makes it possible to output different streams in a single instance of Liquidsoap, which RadioPi needed. As a consequence we removed the restriction that one source must have at most one father, without any extra burden for the user.
Liquidsoap 0.3.0 keywords