Heron Broadcaster goes on air

Heron Broadcaster now has a home on the web. Heron is free, self-hosted radio automation for Linux: it plays your music around the clock to your Icecast servers, crossfaded and scheduled with clockwheels, and it is run entirely from a browser.

What works today

• The library: Heron watches your music folder and analyzes every track: loudness, true peak, silences, where the next track can start, a waveform.
• New music: files uploaded from the browser or dropped into a folder wait in a buffer zone, where they are identified with AcoustID and MusicBrainz, checked for duplicates and prepared with their tags and categories before you import them.
• Playout: two decks with crossfades, Gap Killer, loudness normalization, an FX player for jingles and a fallback folder, streamed in MP3 to one or more Icecast servers.
• Rotation: categories, clocks, a weekly schedule, separation rules and restrictions, with a log that explains every pick.
• The web interface, in English and French, and an HTTP and WebSocket API for everything it does.

How well it holds up

The engine core has just passed its long-run test: it has been playing for four days without a single problem. It was built to stay on air when things around it fail: the database, the API, a stream server or a slow network share. Chaos tests break each of them on purpose while listening to the stream.

What comes next

Preparing tracks in the buffer zone has just been completed. Next come webhooks and listener statistics, followed by audio processing: an EQ per deck, then AGC and multiband compression. More encoders, more kinds of outputs and live DJ come last.

Heron is still in early development, so expect changes. If you want to try it, the installation guide takes a few minutes, and the GitHub repository welcomes bug reports and ideas.