Borris on Nostr: Some who have known me for a long time will be familiar with a project I did, called ...

Some who have known me for a long time will be familiar with a project I did, called FX Radio.

This was an idea conceived in 2005, which happened on and off until September 2019, when I last ran it from the old apartment.
Basically, the idea is this.
Take three media players shuffling a huge collection of sound effects, stack them on top of each other, then stream it all to an Icecast server.
It sometimes created interesting atmospheres and/or situations. Maybe interesting dreams if you, like me, sometimes fell asleep with it on.

In the old days, I ran this setup using a Windows machine that didn't have much else to do, three copies of Winamp, and virtual audio cable.

I eventually added more to it, at one point even including a thing I called the "SHOUT BOX!" where you could call a phone number and yell at the stream for 90 seconds through some VST plugins. There were two simultaneous channels, each with a different plugin stack, so that made things fun for a while.
I used one of those crappy free DIDs for the phone number, so it didn't cost me anything extra, and it didn't really matter if the phone number broke, or whatever.

Then, my last Windows XP machine died sometime in, I think, 2017. At this point, I was still using it for streaming purposes, since it was reliable, but it had no internet access. Yay for local servers and junk!
I didn't really want to invest in another Windows machine, nor did I really have the space.

So, I learned how to use Liquidsoap, and moved the entire thing over to a Raspberry Pi 2 with an external HDD connected. This did actually work, but it took every bit of horsepower that little 900 mHz quad core board could provide.

It had an annoying problem, though. After about a day of streaming, Liquidsoap would hang. Not crash, just hang. It would require it's process to be killed from killall. Pressing CTRL+C while this thing was running in the foreground just sat there and looked at you, like, what, you want me to actually die? HAHAHAHAHA, you're funny!

I never could figure out why this was happening. I still don't know. So, I tried moving it to a slightly more powerful Raspberry Pi 3 modeul B Plus. It happened less frequently on that board, but it still happened.

To work around this, I just wrote a hackey bash script that looked to see if Liquidsoap's log file had been updated in more than a minute, and if not, force Liquidsoap to restart. There were a lot of entries in the log, so it almost never happened that the log wouldn't change multiple times a minute.

Anyhow, that all worked fine, until I needed that rPi for another project, so I repurposed it, then lost the MicroSD card containing my Liquidsoap configuration that I had slaved over. Fortunately, I found a backup of an old version later. This one still had some issues, from what I recall, but it's better than nothing, especially since not only have I basically forgotten everything I ever learned about Liquidsoap, but it has changed drastically since then. This was running under V1.2.x, I think.

Anyhow, a couple of years ago, I set up an old Intel NUC back at my parents' place in North Carolina, with a 2TB NVME2 SSD. The idea was that I could stash it over there somewhere, install Liquidsoap. and get FX Radio running again without paying for a huge amount of storage on a VPS, or trying to host it here at the house, which I don't want to do for a number of reasons I won't get into here.

I loaded up all the media, then promptly discovered that there are all sorts of reasons why the current version of Liquidsoap just won't quite work for this project without essentially re-learning everything, and even then, maybe not.

I thus installed the latest 1.x version, which is still in Debian 12's repositories, in hopes that I could use my old script from 2018 to revive this silly project that probably only myself and a few others cared about.

That project has been sitting on hold since September of 2023, with the only thing I have to show being my nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqdtkxcat25cxdycpdayxr9camwhc9lc47c5vu334l329cngs0e3uskgld76 (nprofile…ld76) account, which throws a random sound effect at followers 40 minutes after the top of every hour.

I'm not sure why I'm writing about this, other than I need a project to take my mind off of stupid things. Maybe this will actually force me to get this silly old thing running again.

Then again, maybe not.