What is Reddit's opinion of Rivendell?

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I'm using it to run a college radio station. Right now it's a server which plays a jukebox of music around any scheduled shows. The web frontend is Airtime but I want to replace it with a Django app I'm developing which is simpler and gives me a bit more control.

If we ever get into full time FM transmission, we may start using Rivendell which is a full professional radio automation system which is only on Linux.

Alright, sounds good. Im not too familiar with the licensing process to be honest, perhaps someone here can share some insight...

For equipment, it depends if you want to do live notifications or pre-recorded. When I started part15 broadcasting, my feed was a 6 hour looped VHS tape with and announcements music on it! Now days a computer will suffice. I use the outdated but still useful WinAmp on a windows XP machine that is no longer connected to the internet. it has ~100GB of music on shuffle 24/7. WinAmp has limiter and compressor plugins, useful on the AM broadcast band. Removing the need for these to be implemented in hardware, saving money. Also audacity is useful for converting Stereo to Mono and normalizing audio. I think VLC and iTunes also have compressors now, so you can use those. Rivendell's automation software isn't bad either, and its free. the audio will be taken from the sound card via a 3.5mm audio cable and run through an 3.5mm to RCA converter. This RCA output is passed into a transmitter. Mine is home made, using DDS technology and a micro controller making it quite frequency agile. Changing the filters, i can move the output to the Shortwave or Long wave bands if needed. the RF output is passed to a ferrous-loaded copper pipe, complete with a few ground radials. Your antenna will be slightly different, but the audio side could be identical.

this looks to be a good schematic for a basic carrier current transmitter

there is an /r/part15 as well, but it appears mostly inactive

We used Rivendell Audio. It works quite well once you get it set up. It's open-source and runs on Linux boxes so you definitely need a sysadmin who knows his linux systems; alternatively, you'll need a ton of patience. There's a bit of a learning curve for the Jocks as well since it's mostly designed for full automation and people will forget to reset the playlist for the correct times if they stop the playlist (called a "log") to play tracks from CDs or vinyl. It does give your PD a lot of powerful tools to schedule and manage music that goes on the air. And it allows for easy voice-tracking so you can maintain a Theater of the Mind in which there are DJs manning the station 24/7.

Personally I think it's worth the effort to implement it if the station as a whole is willing to embrace it. When we added it we ran into a lot of resistance from people who romanticized CDs and vinyl. Eventually came to accept it and use it.

This is the wrong sub, but I used to work in radio years ago (part-time engineering, production and on-air).

If you want some nice sounding paid software, checkout the OtsAV series of software. I know of several web and radio stations running the Ots AV Radio Broadcaster software. It supports multi source crossfading, queuing, timeslotting, playlisting, external triggering, etc... all the stuff you'd need to run a station. http://www.otsav.com/ Ots AV supports off-air recording/editing and later auto-playback (great for request shows) and interviews. Ots also has one of the best sounding almost lag-less software audio processors (compressor/limiter/AGC/deesser) that I've heard too.

If you want to checkout some free open-source GPL software, Rivendell Radio makes a lovely suite http://www.rivendellaudio.org/ Its runs on Linux, is rock-solid and has really nice touchscreen capabilities and also supports off-air recording/editing.

Both can be run in full-auto, assisted-auto/manual and manual modes.

If you want to checkout some amazing audio processing software http://www.stereotool.com/ runs on Linux and is probably the most customizable and capable processor I've come across. Unfortunately it costs up to ~$300USD for the full broadcast FM package (but that's saving you thousands in hardware).

If it's just the streaming, icecast (as mentioned elsewhere) is pretty straight forward. For more aspects of actually running a station, the big players are Rivendell and Airtime (formerly Campcaster).

http://www.rivendellaudio.org/

Crazy powerful, extensible, open source.

If you roll your own, I would highly recommend having somebody Linux-savvy around.

Otherwise, you can buy premade systems and support from https://www.paravelsystems.com/

Back when I was running tech for a college radio station, we used Rivendell to run an automated stream. It's got a bit of a learning curve, but works well if you want to have an actual stream for people to listen to.

http://www.rivendellaudio.org/

Rivendell is a complete radio broadcast automation solution, with facilities for the acquisition, management, scheduling and playout of audio content. It has all of the features one would expect in a modern, fully-fledged radio automation system, including support for both PCM and MPEG audio encoding, full voicetracking and log customization as well as support for a wide variety of third party software and hardware. As a robust, functionally complete digital audio system for broadcast radio applications, Rivendell uses industry standard components like the GNU/Linux Operating System, the AudioScience HPI Driver Architecture and the MySQL Database Engine. Rivendell is available under the GNU Public License.

If any of you programmers know programmers the project can always use some help and contribution. I spoke to the project lead at NAB and he said he'd like to update to a new user interface and get support for more AOIP boards. Remember to donate to the project and spread the word about it too. Also check over the support documents and submit changes if you can't contribute in any other ways.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this, but if you are looking to do a podcast that is more like a traditional radio show, Rivendell is the best free software, hands down. http://www.rivendellaudio.org/ Quite a few NPR stations actually use it, definitely worth checking into. The key is to make sure you have JACK properly configured, my advice is to download one of the studio Linux distros (Ubuntu Studio is probably best for newbies) and see if it's right for you.