Welcome

This site is dedicated to documenting the installation of Rivendell radio automation and related systems in a multi-station radio network.

The original setup was Simian radio automation which was not well suited for a multi-station radio network with only a couple of staff. Audio output from each Simian machine was routed to a Barix Instreamer, then streamed across the internet to each tower equipped with a Barix Exstreamer.

The decision was made to go with an Ubuntu Linux LTS setup for the operating system on all machines. The KXstudio Ubuntu derivative was chosen because of its fully integrated JACK audio sound system.

The new setup with Rivendell radio automation runs seven stations from one Rivendell playout. The output from Rivendell is picked up by Darkice and patched into Icecast where it is split into seven streams. Legal IDs and Traffic are triggered by macros which then insert the local content onto each stream with the EZstream application. Barix Exstreamers at each tower pickup each station stream from the Icecast server running on the Rivendell master playout machine.

The full system when completed was as follows:

KXStudio 14.04 LTS operating system
Rivendell radio automation v2
JACK audio sound server
JackRack with compressor plugin
JackMixer for volume control
SilentJack silence detector
IceCast streaming server
DarkIce streaming source
EzStream local stream insert
Rotter audio log recorder
NFS network file sharing
NetJACK network audio transport
Multimon DTMF triggering

Other components installed but not necessary:

Rivendell patches to support dark themes
OMD nagios monitoring system
MeshCentral remote control
NeoRouter free VPN