Software-defined (Internet) radio with Liquidsoap (2023)

Liquidsoap is great, it's exactly what I've been searching for, for many years. I was using Winamp on Windows for years but it was just buggy and a resource hog. I tried a few other solutions, but nothing worked well. Then I found Liquidsoap and it's perfect. I now run about 30 radio streams from my 1gbit home internet connection. I run Liquidsoap (and shoutcast server) in a single Ubuntu VM, it takes very little resources. I have not had one problem with buffering or any other streaming issue since switching to Liquidsoap. These streams are all for personal use (and for friends). I serve several channels each of several different music genres, so it's always easy to tune in to music we love. If one channel isn't what we're in the mood for, we switch to another channel. It's been a game-changer for our quality of life where entertainment is concerned. We have about 1TB of mp3s in the collection, so it's quite a lot of music. And Liquidsoap has made it fairly easy to do. Once I got one station working, it was easy to duplicate it until we had about 30 stations streaming. I haven't even begun to tap the potential of what it can do, but it serves us really well for what we need.

Liquidsoap is amazing. I've done a number of small radio projects with it and friends over the years, including some wild things like mixing 10+ remote drone musicians together into a single feed with just liquidsoap behind icecast and I don't feel like I've begun to scrape the surface of what it can do.

I never quite got to fix my issues with firefox stopping playing my radio stream after changing songs. It just happens occasionally though I haven't tried recently to see if the problem is still there. At some point I thought liquidsoap cured this but it didn't. Also when I was into that, I got the feeling most of the internet didn't care about radio streams anymore since video streaming is the standard.

I’ve wanted to build an internet radio with some small PC or maybe a Pi for a while that could be left without needing constant tweaking and maintenance. I’ve seen Icecast before. Is liquidsoap a good option for this idea?

I’d make a PCB with some buttons and a dial on it, but unsure what the software side of that would look like and how it would send commands to whatever radio software is running.

I admittedly misread the title and thought that some people are creatively repurposing this audio streaming program for transferring IQ datastreams for Software defined radio (SDR) receivers... It may be actually doable with some hacking.

This is such a secret sleeper piece of software. Keep in mind this will also do video as well, which excites me to experiment with making 24/7 streaming channels like old-school cable tv.

my friend set up a radio station using Liquidsoap for their band turbozone.org