Building Your Own Radio Network with Liquidsoap

Building a localhost radio empire.

With a ton of archived music and podcasts sitting on my NAS, I wanted to do something fun and run my own radio network - a collection of radio stations like “Business Podcasts”, “Metal”, and whatever else I might want to listen to. Then, I can tune into it at any point of time via my phone or on my Sonos speakers.

You can build this with Liquidsoap - described as “a powerful and flexible language for describing audio and video streams”.¹

I’ve created an open-source repository kristianfreeman/radio that will help you do this.

First, you can set up a config.yaml:

stations:
  # Podcasts
  - name: comedy
    directories:
      - "/podcasts/comedy-podcast"
    shuffle: true
  - name: business
    directories:
      - "/podcasts/business-podcast"
      - "/podcasts/business-podcast2"
    shuffle: true
  - name: business_focus
    directories:
      - "/podcasts/business-podcast"
      - "/podcasts/business-podcast2"
    music_directories:
      - "/music/bgm"
    podcast_volume: 0.7
    music_volume: 0.3
    shuffle: true
  # Music
  - name: edm
    directories:
      - "/music/techno"
  - name: metal
    directories:
      - "/music/metal"

This example shows a few varieties of stations. You can name each station, and pass a directory of audio files to load. Liquidsoap will recursively search the directories and add the files inside to the station (and shuffle them, via the shuffle param).

My favorite is the hybrid music/podcast station. It basically muxes music and podcasts together on the fly - so you can build fun mixes. For instance, I have a bunch of chill vaporwave/focus music mixed with business podcasts.

With your config.yaml set up, you can run make to run the build script. It’s a Python script that parses the config and outputs a .liq file for Liquidsoap. That file gets executed by Liquidsoap, and your radio stations will begin!

The Liquidsoap server runs a server called “Harbor” that outputs all the stations on a single URL structure:

• localhost:8000/business
• localhost:8000/comedy
• localhost:8000/metal

With those URLs, you can plug them into VLC, iTunes, or add them on your Sonos app, and start streaming!