Free Radio Station (7)

Azuracast is a great tool to deploy an online radio station, totally for free. It is robust and delivers a quality sound. Yet, it is not 100% professional. I've found some issues with playlists, but still, it's OK for a hobby. Also, it may be that you won't have all of these issues...

The tool that you’ll definitely use is the Reports > Song Playback Timeline, where the already played songs are listed. That's where you can analyze if something went otherwise than planned.

Sequential Playlist

For example, if you set a sequential playlist, you may find that the audio files don’t always play in the uploaded order or by their name. To set it right, go to More > Reorder button. Then in Profile view, click restart AutoDJ service Liquidsoap.

You may also find that not all the files within a playlist were broadcast. Go to Media > Music Files and untick the songs from the playlist, Save, then tick them back. This will force the software to reset the playlist…

Shuffled Playlist

In shuffled playlists, the songs are played in a random order. Yet, there is a bug there. Analyzing the reports, I noticed that the Shuffled playlists are behaving like the Random type, namely, some songs don't get played while others are more frequently played. I reported this bug in the AzuraCast forum. One of the users, coincidentally, also a Romanian guy, found the fix: disable the "Avoid Duplicate Artists/Titles" feature in the playlist's Basic info tab.

Playlist Priority

When you have more than one playlist, you should know their "weight", that is, the priority that Liquidsoap software will use when it has to decide which one to promote when the song changes. The bigger the value, the more importance the playlist has for the algorithm.

A General Rotation playlist has the value 3 by default, but you can change it up and down as you like.

A Once Per X Minutes Playlist has the value 2. (Every X minutes, the next song from this playlist will be played.)

A Once Per X Songs Playlists has the value 4. (Every X songs from the whole pool, the next song from this playlist will be played.)

A Once Per X Hour Playlists has the value 6. (Every X hours and Y minutes, the next song from this playlist will be played.)

What the “next song” means depends on the type of playlist (shuffled or sequential). The random type picks up a song randomly each time, so it may choose the same song three times in a row, for example, which is not desirable.

Relay Issues

I noticed that, with the Intel shape (not with the Ampere shape), although the Azuracast software works perfectly without interruptions, the YouTube relay may sometimes stop streaming.

I then had to connect to my Oracle server and either restart services or even reboot the VM. This was a common issue that I've come across, but it was not critical, because the radio station still ran on my server, even though the RTMP signal was sometimes blocked by the streaming platform.

Another disappointment was that I couldn't send a stable image to YouTube; something was always going wrong. (Not to mention that Twitch cannot even display the song metadata…) Other software like Restreamer might solve this issue, but that’s a different approach.

The SSL Issue

Initially, the radio station is publicly available only through a separate HTTP webpage, and the AzuraCast player widget cannot be embedded into HTTPS webpages (which are the standard). To make the radio station available through an SSL transmission is a more complex task, as you can see in my chapter "AzuraCast Installation with SSL on an Ampere A1 shape". It is doable, but requires some troubleshooting. This is not an AzuraCast issue, technically speaking.

Final and periodical checks

Final check (once)

After successfully completing your project and the VM is running properly, it is recommended that you take a final check to ensure you are within the "Always Free" available resources.

If you created more than one VM, go to Instances and make sure that you do not have more than 4, for example:

Go to Storage and check the following Block volumes: Block volume, Block volume backup, and Boot volume. All three should not sum up more than 200 GB.

Go to Boot volume backup and to Object Storage bucket, the sum of which should not exceed 20 GB. See the screenshots in the opening chapter.

Go to Virtual Cloud Networks and check to have no more than 2 VCNs. See the screenshots in the UPDATE chapter.

NOTE: You can create more subnets in a VCN for several VMs.

For example, the first VM will use the public IP, while the second VM will be placed in a private subnet without a public IP, and the VMs can communicate with each other privately or with other Oracle services.

Or, you can attach the IP to a Network Load Balancer (also available as an "Always free" resource) and direct traffic to the VMs' private IPs (e.g., 10.0.1.1 and 10.0.2.1) on different ports, respectively (e.g., port 8080 and port 2222).

Maintenance

● Monitor the CPU usage, traffic and memory to exceed the mandatory 20% threshold.

Also, make a manual backup after important changes, and download the .zip file to your PC.

Troubleshooting the YouTube Relay

Check daily if YouTube has stopped streaming your audio-video RTMP signal. If AzuraCast is running fine (usually it does), and YouTube stream is down, the immediate solution is to restart the services that control both the FFmpeg and the Metadata update scripts:

If the YouTube stream will not restart within a few seconds, the last solution is to reboot the Ubuntu operating system to clear the cache:

An ARM-based minor issue

Another issue that I didn't experience with the Intel x86-64 shape, but did with the Ampere ARM-based shape, is that, occasionally, the last 1-2 characters of the Title or Artist in the song's metadata are clipped. We've tried various software fixes, none of which worked. So, we've concluded that the root cause resides in the underlying hardware architecture or the operating system's kernel/libraries. The ARM-compiled FFmpeg might be reading the text in chunks that happen to cut off the last few bytes of a multi-byte UTF-8 character. If it happens to you, then you'll know why.

I hope this documentation has brought some light to using the Oracle Free VM and AzuraCast software for radio broadcasting. I worked a lot to gain all this knowledge and to also spread it to whoever needs it. Use it wisely to bring joy to yourself and other people!

AzuraCast Issues & Recommendations