Complex set-ups#

The installer will help you to quickly broadcast a radio from a dedicated machine or virtual machine running Linux. Radiotomate can also fit in more complex situations.

Multiple radios on a single machine#

You can broadcast multiple radio streams from a single machine. Each stream should be an independant Radiotomate instance, so you must tell the installer to put each one in its own folder and behind its own ports.

After each installation you must also rename the beet and radiotomate commands that the installer sets up in your Bash start-up script (~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile). These commands (which are actually Bash aliases) target a precise Radiotomate instance, and running the install script will overwrite those called beet and radiotomate. To avoid this, at the end of your start-up script, find the two lines like:

alias beet='podman --...
alias radiotomate="podman --...

To be sure those will always target the right Radiotomate instance, edit these two lines so commands have a distinct name:

alias beet_radio1='podman --...
alias radiotomate_radio1="podman --...

Then you can launch the installer to create an additional radio. Be careful to give a meaningful UNIT_NAME to each one, because this changes its data folder name but also the pod and systemd service names. For example:

UNIT_NAME=yetanotherradio STREAM_INPUT_PORT=4440 INTERFACE_PORT=4441 ./install.sh

Re-using a music libray#

If you're already using Beets or if you want to re-use the library from another Radiotomate instance, you'll have to configure two folders when installing.

The first is BEETSDIR, which contains Beets' configuration file. You can find it with beet config -p. The second is MUSIC_DIRECTORY, it is the value of Beets' directory option. By default Radiotomate puts these two folders in its data root.

These options can be passed to the installer as follows:

BEETSDIR=/home/radio1/Beets MUSIC_DIRECTORY=/home/radio1/Music ./install.sh

Manual installation#

If you can install Liquidsoap and Python applications yourself you can also try a developer installation, as described in contributors' documentation.

Windows?#

In theory this should even work on Windows, by launching the installer in WSL and/or running the pod in Podman desktop. We did not had time to test it so far: if you do, get in touch with us!