Episode: 1023 Title: HPR1023: About Rivendell with Rivendell Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1023/hpr1023.mp3 Transcribed: 2025-10-17 17:33:07 --- Let's see if this works. Seriously now, don't you have better uses for $15,000? This is the open-source Riffindel radio automation system. Hello, hello, this is Ork on DK. And this is an HBR episode on the Riffindel radio auto-aimation system. Now, as a warning, unlike my past two episodes, this isn't scripted. We're not much anyway. I'm doing this as live because I have the strange idea about doing my own podcast. I don't really want to be reading from a script for all that, so I'm doing this kind of like a radio show would actually be done. I spoke about Riffindel in the last podcast I did along with lots of other internet radio software things, and Riffindel is probably the most complex of the lot because it is designed for real radio stations, things. You get software which you have to pay huge amounts of money for, and they're all tied together, so you can have a suite of machines and a suite of software all doing the editing, all doing the queuing, creating playlists, all of that stuff, as well as playing back shows that it can automatically record. Riffindel has all of this stuff, and it's all open-source, free software running on Linux, I think exclusively, although some things can work on Windows, I think some of the uploading. So hopefully this will get me into doing podcasting properly. I want to do something where a sort of a magazine show talking about crap that I like and also playing some creative commons music. So that's what I'm going to do, so I'm going to play a track for you now. This is all stuff that I've gotten from Jemendo, it's all creative commons. In fact, the music that's playing underneath me at the moment, which I'll talk about how that's set up on the system later, that this is by a Serbian artist called Alexander Blue, which is really nice as a bit of a bed music. But we'll talk about that later. I'm now going to play you a track by Brad Sucks, as I'm sure everyone who knows about creative commons music has heard Brad stuff, and this is my favourite track from his second album, and it's called There's Something Wrong, which I hope is not going to be what this hot podcast is going to be like. So let's go, let's click. It seems a little strange, but I just can't explain why I'm tearing out a page and then I'm sending it all over the ocean, and I've been feeling down lately, ever since I met at your bay bay, people say I'm making crazy, they say that I'm over emotional. Oh, well, well, everybody says it's funny, but I can't say it's inappropriate for me. People come and go, and I know now that you know, just the noises in my throat say I'll take however long that it takes me. I can't understand why I need to be your bed. I have a perfect plan, but right now I guess it all mistakes me. Yeah, there's something wrong, in my life there's something wrong, in my life there's something wrong, well, well, everybody says it's funny, but I can't say it's inappropriate for me. Okay, well, that didn't work quite well, playing that and then I got a phone call from the wife, so I probably cut that out on the podcast, anyway, it doesn't matter. So why am I using Rivendell well on it to try it out, and it's a bit of a pain to install, unfortunately, so I'm going to go through a bit on how I installed it, and when I installed it on, blah, blah, blah. So you can, there is a live CD, there's a few live CDs, I think they, the software is designed to run on OpenSusur, but obviously it's Linux, so there's also a Debian package as well, but they're really old versions, it's like 1.7 something, whereas the latest version is 2.0.3, probably, anyway, something like that, it's in the 2, and I wanted to try out version 2, because it does a few things differently under the hood, and I didn't want to go through messing about with upgrading it, so, so I am running Ubuntu Studio 12.04, which is the long-term support relief, which is due out next month, or on the end of this month, I got the daily installed it, but it's on an external USB drive, which I talked about in my other HBR episode, and so I can just plug in my external drive into whichever machine that I happen to be using at the time, and I can just boot up into a, essentially, a live session, although it does, it writes to the drive, it's like a 100 gig partition on one of my external drives, which is all very good, so it means I can work it on at work, and I can then come home and plug into another machine, or even my laptop, or maybe netbook, but I don't think that fits on the screen. I'm not doing, let's carry on. I picked Ubuntu Studio because, obviously, it has a lot of audio stuff already installed, so I've got Audacity and Ardore, and a whole bunch of jack stuff, so that made it a little bit simpler, I didn't have to install a whole bunch of other things, and also I kind of like XFCE, because that's what Ubuntu Studio has instead of Unity, but it probably runs quite well in Unity if I try it out, but we'll see. So I was compiling from Source, which isn't too bad, there's a few things, a bit dodgy, the dot-configure file had some odd stuff in it, which I need to swap around in for it to compile, Rivendale uses Qt3, which is obviously quite old now, it looks alright, but it does mean, when you've got a Qt4-based system, you've got to make sure it's pointing at the right place for it compiling, so that didn't take too long, I've written a blog post on where I got the instructions from and the changes I had to make, because the instructions I had there were for an older version of Ubuntu, my bad music stop, there we go, start again, what was next? So it uses MySQL and Apache, which is great, MySQL is obviously for the database, for the music and for almost everything else, the way this is set up is it's all in one big database, it obviously doesn't store the music inside the database, but it does store all the meta tags, and a lot of things like scheduling, and the whole setup of the system itself as well, so it's quite easy to move the setup of one install system to another, back it up, because it is just MySQL database, you can even have that database running on a separate machine, and if you wanted to add a new machine, they just have to point to that database on a separate server rather than having to copy it over onto each machine. And Apache, I understand it used to be that it would, you'd need to use some system internally to doing its importing, but now it's using Apache as part of the import system, which might be a little bit tricky because it means you have to set up Apache and have to set up all those things, but also the reason that they're using Apache now is because they can use a web-based uploading system so you can create your tracks and carts and schedules and things through a web interface. I've not got that working because I managed to mess something up because of the way Apache is set up on different systems, but got to work on that. That's cool. Jack, the Jack audio connection kit, as it's called, is obviously awesome and the way I've got everything set up on here is purely down to how amazing Jack is. I've got, basically, Rivendale has a whole bunch of Jack outputs, assuming that you obviously install the, you compile it with Jack support, but we've got a whole bunch of Jack outputs and each Rivendale program can be pointed to the different outputs and then you can plug those outputs out into whichever system you want. I could, in fact, plug it into individual ports as in sound ports on the sound card, so if I wanted to use a hardware mixer, I could have the separate outputs coming from Rivendale out into separate things on the sound card which then goes into the mixer and then the mixer can go out into external microphones and FM, transmitter or whatever. You've got a lot of flexibility, but obviously as I'm just running off of a desktop PC and I've basically got Rivendale going out into Jack mixer, which is a standard mixer setup. You can create desliders and for each thing and just label them and then plug in all your Rivendale stuff into that and then have that go out individually to reach the recording and to my headphones and all that. Play the music and you should have got some more music. Anyway, just a minute. That's working nicely. Pulse audio is not too bad now with its Jack support, so if I could, if I needed to play something which didn't have Jack support I could, obviously I'm then reduced to only having one slider for that because there's only one output. Same with the input as well if I had to use pulse to do my input on the voice, I'd have to do that. So yeah, what's next? So the rest of the output I've got, I've actually got two sound cards running because the main sound card in the machine is running everything that Rivendale's doing, but I've got a USB headset which I was able to run into Jack separately using something called ulcer in and there's also ulcer out. It basically creates a separate Jack input and output for a different sound card. You get a bit of latency on it, but I don't think for what I'm doing, it's perfectly good. So I've got all this stuff running in and out of Rivendale and into Audacity, yeah, recording on Audacity. I did ponder the idea of actually having our door running and do a full-on multi-track thing so that the music, the bed music, the microphone, all of that is all on different tracks running to a lot of track on I'd or so I could mix it afterwards if I did mess something up, but I thought that's yeah, that's a little bit too much to set up each time. So it's just running into Audacity thing recording it as live. Some other things I've got, well I'll talk about the basic uses of Rivendale itself. This was me talking about my setup itself, so I'm going to play you another piece of music. Another bit of creative commons from Jim Mendo, obviously I picked something French which is going to be really hard to pronounce and the track is called Delirion de Planit by an artist called Lostana David, probably David Lostana and she's thinking about it. Okay, but I'm going to play that. It's a nice bit of guitar and singing in French. I should have done this told you last time how long the track was so that everyone who's completely bored by listening to music and wants to hear me drawing on about something later on we can just stick to it anyway. So this track is three minutes 45.7 seconds which is great, this tells me right in front of me. So you'll be able to skip forward about three minutes and listen to me drawing on about what I can do with Rivendale. Okay, let's go. Bonjour! Every time we see each other, they wake me up and I go back to where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I came to know that every night, the design model is full I'm like my girlfriend in Paris Look at me, I'm lost time for the colors But I'm not in the same reality And in the same planet, I'm still in a world of dreams And I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I'm not in the religion, not in the diction I'm not in the world of dreams I'm lost time for the colors I'm not in the diction I'm lost time for the colors I'm lost time for the colors I'm not in the same planet, I'm still in a world of dreams And I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I'm not in the same planet, I'm still in a world of dreams And I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I'm not in the same planet, I'm still in a world of dreams And I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I'm not in the same planet, I'm still in a world of dreams And I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I'm not in the same planet, I'm still in a world of dreams And I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best I'm back from where I come from That's why I wanted to come to the end and I was young I found all the best You're experiencing Riverdale, radio automation OK, right, I'm back And I've changed the bed music So, let's have a talk about what I can actually do with Irvindal And what I have been trying to be doing while you're listening to me droning on The main part, the main playback Part of Riverdale is an app, my application called Airplay And basically, it's a very touch screen safe It's a nice big chunky button, so if I had a touch screen I could be tapping away And it has got, Tom, I'll include a picture in the show notes And you can never look at that Besides you've got the main playlist that you're going to be doing And you've got nice big green buttons as they start next to them And it gives you all the information, you know, the artists and how long they are And if they're playing it will show the little progress bar going along A nice thing is at the top you've got this big green circle And when you haven't got anything playing it just as it's there with nothing on And it becomes a clock basically it ticks along and shows you how to glance How much longer you've got until you need to play something else or start speaking It gives you a countdown after 20 seconds to go But also each track, if you go in and you set it up Each track can have a point on it where it says you can start talking now And so we can also count down to that So you can give you any different colour on the pie chart on the clock It will tell you that That's very neat and really good for DJs who've got a lot going on all the same time It's because they can show you that It's got a clock on there Which actually has the actual time to just read that off And next to that you've got a thing which can tell you when the next automatic track is going to start The way it works is because radio stations are obviously time sensitive You can set this all up so that things will start automatically at a certain time It's like I'm looking at a clock now and it's coming up to six o'clock and it could be that I could set up a track Towards the mic and start playing at this time And so it will tell me that it's going to do that so you better start talking quickly And finish off what you're doing before this thing starts again It can also set it up so that each track is scheduled to play at a certain time But you can tell it to do it all by manual But it will also tell you how far behind in the schedule you are And how much time you have to make up If you're ahead of schedule as well it can tell you that And so you can add a glance to work out Okay, I need a track which is four minutes long to fit this space Obviously I haven't really done that with this podcast But I work on working on student radio and things like that So I'm hoping to use this software to do it And that's going to help I'm rambling again which is great when I'm doing this live So let's play about on the right hand side of the main airplay screen They've also got customizable buttons so you can play stings and idents And things like that Okay, the bed music stopping so I'll be able to show you this I've got some buttons which I've set up now to some sad effects So grenade Lovely I've also got the dramatic boom Drama And obviously these buttons can be set up with anything I could set it up with music which is what I've done with the bed music So the music is behind me I can just click that And it starts playing the bed music from earlier Stop that I've got like a thunderstorm behind me So it sounds like I'm on a dark and stormy night Anyway So that's neat One of the really cool things Kind of cool Obviously this is based on old style Yeah, that's not the thunderstorm That's the music Okay Old-style systems where you'd have a cart for each piece of music So this big sort of multi-track tape Which you'd then need plug in to the system and you'd play it off that Of seeing, now we're all digital, we can have whatever we want Each song is on an individual cart on the database But it doesn't have to have just one piece of music in a cart Or one sound What you can do if you've got a whole bunch of commercials from the same person You can have the like multiple takes, multiple versions of that same commercial And you can click on it and it will play one And then later on you can click on it again And be sure that it's not going to play the same one It will play the next one on the list So for example the Rivendell radio automation He's almost a commercial sting Which I've been playing a couple of times over the podcast this thing The best radio automation system you'll never pay for Rivendell radio automation Now I've got three of those I know all assigned to the same button So if I press it again, seriously now Don't you have better uses for $15,000? This is the open source Rivendell radio automation system So that's the other one And so there's three of those And it will play the main order And then it will loop around every time you press it So you could have a set of commercials And you can be sure that you're not going to play the same one twice in the same hour or whatever So that's all set up And then you can have, you've got like a grid of, it's five by five You can color them, you can set them all up by that They flash when you press them But then I can have multiple versions of this panel I can just click and switch to another one So each show, if you want a radio station, each show can have a different set So if a particular DJ likes his silly noises You can just set them all up once It doesn't have to set them up again When else we got here That's the sound panel The right hand side of the, of airplay also has a way you can set up the logs See what you have played and what you will be playing Is the playlists set up And it's all ultra complicated You can have some auxiliary logs as well Playing music that doesn't turn up on the left-hand side Anyway, let's skip on a bit Because this is maybe too complicated for me to just try and rattle off of my top of my head See, it doesn't say I play Importing music can be quite easy I mean, it's got a, there's an application separate app for your library And you can do the normal sort of importing You can set up normalizing, cropping the tracks down Putting in more than one track into the carts Which is, that's quite easy and straightforward But you can do, if you had a massive load of music you wanted to import all at once You can set up a drop box folder on each machine So you can look for a particular type of file in a particular folder And it will, if it sees it, there's a demon running behind Which just imports it all at once and pops it in Obviously, you are kind of limited to If you've got decent ID3 track tags Which is what it gets its information from So you might be better off doing it one by one At which point you can also set up You know, when's the save time to talk during a track So you don't go over any singing or anything like that And all of that stuff So that's quite neat There's a whole bunch of stuff I haven't properly got into The way it puts up your playlists and your logs for each show Each time of day can be automatically generated You've got like a scheduling wizard which you can set up I want this many tracks in an hour They need to be between, you know, about this long And then it will go through each track that it's got And create a playlist for you It'll even let you avoid having like three 80s tracks in a row And by using tags on each track as you've imported them And so the system itself will know I don't want to be playing Aha, three times in a row Not that you'd want to But you could set it up that you do You just want 80s tracks in this hour Interspersed with a commercial So it can be set up to be completely automated It doesn't have to be a DJ tour That's quite cool, I need to get more into that There's a system called Voice Tracking as well Which allows you, when you're creating your playlist The logs, they're not limited to doing one thing after another With no overlap You can set segues so that it fades between the two And also you can set up a separate file to play Sort of between the two tracks overlapping each one And you can set that up in the log You can even record your voice directly into the system That's something I haven't really done yet as well But it's so... yeah I mean I'm not regretting using it because it's very neat And it's just practice using it And that's one problem I think they've had Is that generally it's only radio stations using it And so therefore the people who have set it up And things like that have set it up in their particular way And so it's not really a cookie cutter thing You can't just install it And hope that it works You have to really work at it Which is a shame because it means that it's a lot harder to get Up and running just to show someone that Look, you could do this so easily Anyway, that's a digression I'm a little... It's taken me a long time trying to get the document... Getting the right pieces of documentation to get it installed properly Anyway, I've been talking for a long time I shall play you another track And then have a little talk about some of the more advanced things I admin And some of the database stuff as well, if I think of anything Anyway, so let's have a go with that This next track is by an artist called Tanya T6 It's called Pieces Fly Away And they're off to Mando, it's about four minutes long And it is pretty generic R&B fluff So if you want to skip forward four minutes I wouldn't blame you Apart from it being a break from my droning nasal voice Which I'm sure I'm going to get sick of when I listen to this recording I've been recording for 35 minutes, lovely Okay, this is Tanya T6, Pieces Fly Away Go! Fly away, fly away I just want to fly away, fly away Fly away, fly away I'm on and I thought some of dreams can't sleep at night So our picture of you and her future seems bright I wondered what would it be, what could it be, what would you do I feel so lonely and what is a girl to do Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to, I want to change lanes that you go I can keep chasing when you give up on time I go I need to shake it off, got a long way to go I'll know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to, I want to change lanes that you go I can keep chasing when you give up on time I go I need to shake it off, got a long way to go I'll fly, fly away, fly away Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I'm gonna throw the rain running from the paint off I'm gonna not feel the wall I'm gonna do my things, I'm going insane, my past and my past Oh, wait, I'll go from here, my past and all on the wall I can't breathe, I'm a respiratory, I'm about to shut down Oh, wait, yeah, yeah, yeah, I wanna, I want to change lanes that you go I can keep chasing when you give up on time I go I need to shake it off, got a long way to go I'll know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to, I want to change lanes that you go Fly away, fly away Let yourself fly, fly away Fly, fly away, fly away I don't know how I'd feel like crying ever I don't know how I'd try to move stuff So I don't know, where do I go? Do I stay? Man, so do I I feel so mean to you But I just wanna fly Fly, fly away Fly away Let yourself fly Fly, fly away Fly away Not yet, that's enough I need you to take that when you can butasta ma go I need you to take a long way to go That's enough, that's enough I need you I need you take that when you can't go But I just wanna fly Fly, fly away I just want to fly away, fly away, fly away, fly away Rocksteady, dependable radio automation, built on the proven Linux platform You're experiencing Rivendell radio automation There we go, right, enough of that fluff Well, they're going to talk about, oh, like, okay, so the admin interface on Rivendell is quite cool Because the database doesn't only hold all your song info and your actual radio stuff You can actually manage your users, so you can have separate users logging into different machines You can actually manage on each of the host machines Each system can be managed using the Rivendell system rather than trying to do something with the Linux system It's got its own thing all over the top and it's all on the same database as your music And you can manage how these hound hardware is hooked up to Rivendell itself You can manage all sorts of things, how each program, each application behaves Lots of things like that and it's very neat because it means that if you do have your database on the separate machine You have multiple machines all logging into the same database And get their settings from there so you don't have to mess about too much And my sequence is quite easy enough to transfer So that's neat, there's a whole bunch of stuff in the admin You can set up all sorts of reporting systems You can back up the database, store the database Different things like that, so that's quite comprehensive It's a bit ugly in Qt3 But it works I'm quite liking the way the system just sits on top of your Linux system It doesn't matter what you're running You could have different machines running Suza and Fedora and Ubuntu and things like that And it wouldn't matter too much because they weren't going to work on top of it And presumably if they were to port it to the Mac or Windows Which is always possible, I mean Qt's multi-platform anyway If they did study up like that, you could have a Windows box running off the same disk of the same information So that's that, as I talked about a little bit, the web interface I didn't get set up properly, but I think it's more to do with how Apache set up on different disk rows So next time I do a full install of the Rivendell I'll start from scratch and try and do it properly There's also a whole sort of interesting macro system Which allows you to send sort of commands across the network to each individual machine So it can send messages to there's a part of AirPlay There's a little box and that can flash up messages Obviously that can be in real time, so a station manager can send a message to the DJ Or even it can be on a time thing Like having a cron job flash up a message to you on a terminal It's this, the scheduler on the system can actually remind you to do something Like remind the DJ or remind whoever's using it That's very deep and there's a lot of stuff It's all nicely learnt slight in that it's got lots of scripting And things like that, lots of potential to do some really interesting things Yeah Sorry Sorry, you couldn't hear that That's an interesting thing actually That mess up has reminded me With each panel, each sound source You can have one, you start something playing And then you start something else playing from the same place It can be split into two jack outputs So it's like just then I pressed the button on the panel Which is playing the bed music And it started playing it on the second track So it meant that you couldn't hear it But I could because it was usaning into my headphones Because that must have been hooked up somewhere But it wasn't hooked up to the recorder So that was fun So it was just finishing off one bed music And trying to play the other one So I had to stop them both And then start again That probably didn't make any sense to you Oh yeah, but anyway, live I'm going to be brilliant at this, aren't I? Okay, so let's have a look at this So I've got three more tracks in music I don't know how I managed to do too much there Oh well I was going to talk a little bit about podcasting Obviously there's a lot of podcasts Just about every podcast these days You like to do their stuff as live Essentially and broadcast it So you've got jack So as long as you set up something like Dark Ice You can have that You could broadcast whatever you like out into Icecast So I'm probably going to be able to do that Assuming anyone wants to listen to me I think I might think about using our door to do the recording Because it means I've got my separate tracks And it means that it'll sound like it's live But the multi-track thing would help me a lot Especially when I'm mucking about like this And I'm doing it as live But it doesn't sound very good Yeah, I could cut out all of those You know, all these ums Anyway, anyway So that seems to be working Right, as I started this It's feeling a lot easier to do once you start talking I tried to start in this three times And I used to get tongue tied So this is a third time a third time a charm I won't play any more music Because I've got three more tracks there I could, but my third's hurting anyway I'm sure the wife will be home soon Right, okay So that's I'm going to leave everything in the show notes That would be to do with Rivendell Rivendell audio If you Google for that you should be able to find it It's really neat And I think one problem is that The documentation is basically a wiki And it's not great Because there's several pages on there Which are just copypaste from forums So you're hunting around a lot Obviously I haven't had enough experience in it in order to think I'm sure there is plenty of documentation on things other than Rivendell Like open suzer which is what the main developers develop it for They probably got great things for that But Debian and Rivendell it's not quite as good And it would be great if more people could look at it And maybe looking to using it For podcasting Especially live podcast Because if people are doing things as live anyway It might be nice to try and use a system which is designed for live broadcast Or stuff There is a really big manual operation guide But unless you're going to read it from cover to cover There's really nice tutorials Not many anyway And when they are there by other people They've stuck it on their blog And if more people could be doing that As like official documentation It might be nice There's also a lack of screencasts At least on YouTube But I did look around But I couldn't really find anything So that's something I might do But it's very tricky to get into Rivendell Because it's so vast There's so much stuff there And I don't have enough trouble explaining it to myself And I don't do you lot Anyway I think I'll wrap this up now If you want to get in contact with me Go to orcondk.com Which is a-u-k-o-n-dk.com I've got a crappy little A landing page It's got a link to my new blog Which is on a separate SiteBlueDriver.com Which is where I'm going to put all my projects So yeah If you want to chat to me on Google+, Twitter Occasionally There's links to everything on orcondk.com So You lot have a nice day I don't know who I'm talking to you necessarily You probably already turned off I bet no one's even listening anymore And I'm probably- I'm not even going to put this out If you want to listen to it back But I'll probably make myself do it Oh Okay, links in the show notes Especially to all the music I've played Because I'm- obviously creative comments You have to give attribution Ever think was You either buy essay Or buy I didn't do anything which is NC Because I saw big trouble with that I just ignore anything that's NC Um Anyway Yeah, I've gone quiet Okay, that's- it's time to stop How a great day And I hope you enjoy the next episode Of how I can public radio A lot more than This one because I just- yeah, oh yeah Okay, right, stop Steven, stop, stop Let's um There we go Good age, wind, thunder Oh my god And we shall be Okay, I'm getting lost now Let's play the Bivendale thing And then I shall play the actual music And um See you next time The best radio automation system You'll never pay for Rivendale Radio Automation You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio or Hacker Public Radio does our We are a community podcast network The release of shows Every weekday and Monday through Friday Today's show, like all our shows Have a nice night like yourself If you ever consider recording a podcast Then visit our website To find out how easy it really is Hacker Public Radio was founded by The digital dot-pound And the infonomicum computer cloud HBR is funded by the binary revolution At binref.com All binref projects are crowd-sponsored by LUNA pages From shared hosting to custom-private clouds, go to LUNA pages.com For all your hosting needs Unless otherwise stasis Today's show is released Under creative comments Attribute show, share a like Read our own license