Picture of Night Vale 'Subversive Radio Host' Merit BadgeI’m working on earning my “Subversive Radio Host” merit badge with my RaspberryPi. Once I’ve got the whole system worked out I’ll likely be doing a Hacker Public Radio episode about it. In the meantime, though, for testing purposes I have a feed from the local NOAA Weather Radio which I am feeding as 10kbps opus audio to an instance of icecast2.

I figured I’d post this since there’s a piece of information I found today regarding having a continuous stream, and someone else may find it useful.

I was finding that my stream to the icecast server, using the command line suggested by the opusenc man page, was spontaneously dying at almost precisely 6 hours, 12 minutes, and 50 seconds. For reference, here’s what the man page says (or at least has for quite some time now and did when I last checked it today) as a suggestion for live-streaming recorded audio in realtime:

arecord -c 2 -r 48000 -twav - | opusenc --bitrate 96 - - | oggfwd icecast.somewhere.org 8000 password /stream.opus

I was using the same string of commands, with minor changes (only one channel, –bitrate 12 [or 10], different address and credentials for oggfwd).

To cut the drama short, the problem turns out to be arecord. I still am not sure whether arecord was hitting a “maximum number of bytes” or “maximum run time” problem, but either way, it turns out you can just use sox (symlinked as “rec”) in its place, which is nice because I had been thinking about playing with having sox apply some filtering to remove noise, etc.

Here’s a suggested replacement command line for this purpose:
rec -c 1 -t wav - | opusenc --bitrate 10 - - | oggfwd icecast.somewhere.org 8000 password /stream.opus
(with the parameters adjusted to your own needs, of course).

It’s been going for over 7 hours now, so I’m assuming my problem is resolved. In the long run it won’t matter so much – my intended use-case in the end involves playing pre-recorded files (and would work perfectly with ices2‘s features if ices2 supported opus…), but for times when I may want to live-stream something, this may come in handy. With opus at 10-12kbps being still decent quality for voice, one ought to be able to feasibly live-stream audio even over a really slow pre-“3G” cellphone data link or dial-up modem in realtime.

Oh, speaking of “Subversive Radio Host” – using the clever pifm software turns the Raspberry Pi into a remarkably powerful transmitter. I think I’ve got my antenna trimmed down enough to make it a legal unlicensed transmitter (my original test was with a 20″ or so piece of alligator-clip wire that happened to be handy, and got the signal out to about three blocks away. Definitely too much power for legal unlicensed use.) I suspect with an ideal-length wire as an antenna you could cover a whole town, if you placed it well, and if you didn’t mind getting the FCC (or whoever your local regulatory agency is) very annoyed with you.

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