Streaming internet radio for fun and

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Last week, internet friend Casey shared a post about Icecast, a project that I'd heard about before but largely put to the side because I am (as has been noted) a fool.

Casey was putting together a collection of various Icecast stations from Cohost, which has since bloomed into the wonderful Cohost Icecast Webring, and has been my go-to listening for the last couple days (you can read Casey's post about it over on Cohost). In a comment on the first post about Icecast, I joked that I was going to make a radio station that's just the barks from Warcraft 2. Unfortunately for my free time over the weekend, Casey replied "hell yeah", and I promptly set to work. Because if there's one thing that will motivate me more than anything, it's a niche joke.

By Sunday afternoon, what had come out of the exchange was 2 Warcraft 2 Radio, a streaming radio station that is just the sounds from Warcraft 2 on shuffle. It's kind of impossible to listen to for more than a few minutes at a time, and sounds a lot like those drive-time radio interstitials ("You're listening to [elephant sound] Big Tony and [bang bang bang] [monkey sound] [glass shattering] The Hoss!") but they never end.

Admittedly my inclusion in the Cohost Icecast Webring is a bit of a cheat, because I couldn't quite wrap my head around Icecast proper on Saturday morning, and opted instead for an ExpressJS server running on Node for familiarity and because it runs well on Glitch. I ended up having so much fun that I made a re-mixable version of the project called Goblin Radio Tower, which you can play around with by either downloading the code from GitHub and running it locally, or remixing on Glitch. It's not as powerful as Icecast and doesn't have many features, but hopefully gives aspiring station-runners a decent place to start by uploading tracks and getting comfy with using a server. If you end up using it, let me know!

A few technical learns from the process, for those interested:

• I'd never tried piping files before, so that took a bit to get used to. The trick, I found, was to think of .pipe() as a .forEach() but instead of an array, it iterates through chunks of data in the file. And instead of a callback function within the pipe(), you use can .on('data') on the writeable you're piping to.
• While it is possible to interrupt piping mid-stream, I found that manually changing from one song to another would cut off current listeners, who would have to then refresh their page to keep listening. It feels like there's an elegant solution for that, but not one that I could find in a weekend.
• Right now I have the stream set to a single content-type, which can be difficult if you've got songs coming from all over the place (because some will be .wav, or .mp3, or .aac, or whatever). I ended up using ffmpeg to batch-convert my files to MP3, which seemed to work best for streaming.
• I played around with streaming video using a similar method, and couldn't quite get it to work. In theory I think it should still be possible, but video likely requires a few more steps than what I've done here.
• Icecast uses a big XML file to show the played song history (similar to an RSS feed, I think), so if you want to manually or semi-automatically grab that data you can. I mimicked this in Goblin Radio Tower by using Socket.IO to set up web sockets and send song metadata to listeners as each song starts — not a perfect solution, just the first that came to mind. It would be more interesting, I think, to try doing something with RSS instead.