The document describes the development and significance of Libretime, a free software radio station automation system, created out of the need for customizable and low-cost solutions for community media. It outlines the project's origins, technical aspects, user functionalities, and the ongoing challenges related to development and community contributions. The author, who has extensive experience in computing and a passion for open-source software, is actively seeking funding and collaboration to enhance Libretime's features and support for users.

1. A Free Software Radio
Station Automation System

2. About Me & my projects
● Board Chair of the Neighborhood Network – which operates
WCRS-LP
● Over 20 years of experience with Linux, Free Software and
computing
● Recent graduate of Ohio State with a degree in computer
science
● Full-time stay at home dad and part-time coder

3. Why Free Software Matters for
Community Media
● Minimizing dependence upon external entities
● Free as in beer – low budgets benefits from low
overhead
● Ability to customize to meet custom needs –
can’t rely upon paid staff
● Helps if the software is usable and maintainable
by non-experts

4. What did we use before LibreTime
● WinAmp
● RadioLogik
● Airtime – a promising web based app but
limited in terms of automation

5. LibreTime Origin Story
● Airtime – a project of
SourceFabric – formerly
CampCaster
● Airtime code license is
switched to AGPLv3
● Submitted my first PR
● Airtime.pro is launched

6. Discussions with SourceFabric
● The airtime.pro code is available under a
branch of github called saas-dev
● Attempt to get saas-dev working to contribute to
next 3.0 version of Airtime
● Communicate with project lead and developer
about contributing
● Saas-dev branch is deleted from github and
email asking about this is ignored

7. LibreTime is born
● Eeebcaster – a demo of the saas-dev branch
released as a zip file – all git history is lost
● The C4 – collective code construction contract
from ZeroMQ – Peter Hintjens
● Making everything visible on GitHub – finding a
fork that was made before the branch was
deleted and releasing as a new project – couldn’t
properly “fork” Airtime – it becomes a new
project

8. Post-Fork: it’s your baby now
● All the bugs you can document – also means
someone needs to fix them
● Planning for the future
● End user support
● Community drama – disagreements and sloppy
contributions

9. LibreTime for Users
● Time for a demo of how LibreTime works from
the point of view of a end-user

10. Calendar
● Show the calendar and the concept of shows

11. Tracks
● Uploading and scheduling

12. Users
● How libreTime allows various roles etc and the
ownership of users over various shows

13. Live Streaming
● Launch Mixxx and broadcast over the existing
stream using a per-show authentication

14. Podcasts, Smartblocks and
Automatic Playlists
● Yes we can digest RSS and use it to feed tracks
● The notion of the playlist, the smartblock and the
automatic playlist explained
● A discussion of the SQL orientated “language” of
the smartblock and how this can be a cognitive
challenge for end users
● How I first took the plug as a developer for
LibreTime

15. Widgets and Radio Page
● We have a player widget – sometimes it uses
flash
● We have a calendar that you can embed via a
iframe
● There is a radio page that provides both of
these and a front-end for the actual stream

16. LibreTime: behind the scenes
● Icecast2: serves the stream
● Liquidsoap: OCAML based media scripting
environment – feeds Icecast stream
● Python: integrates liquidsoap with the web site
● RabbitMQ: queue based messaging interface
● PHP & Postgresql + Propel ORM: creates the website
that end users interact
● Javascript – lots of jQuery, Angular & too much custom
code

17. LibreTime: a developer perspective
● Zend 1 MVC – EOL in 2016 – still no clear path
forward in 2018
● Jquery plugins that were all hacked in various
ways thus breaking the ability to upgrade to a
new version
● Tests – some tests but not much coverage

18. Dive Into LibreTime
● A brief walk through of the codebase showing
how the various PHP functions are linked
together and how much of a pain it can be to
add new features

19. The Future of LibreTime
● Technical Debt: how to build the future when
the foundation is shaky
● Complete overhaul or incremental approach
● Rebuild one part at a time ?
● How to deal with taking over partially completed
work by people who are no longer involved

20. LibreTime: Community
● There is an obvious need for LibreTime as new
users come on-line every day looking for a
web-based way to run a “radio” station
● Contributions from around the globe:
developers in Austria, UK, Mexico, Brazil

21. LibreTime: a work in progress
● Seeking grants to fund development: The
Neighborhood Network received a grant from the
Greater Columbus Arts Council to fund
improvements to LibreTime
● Creating a Open Collective to create an
accountable body to manage funds as a project
● How do you get everyone on board when people
are contributing in their free time and have
differing levels of availability

22. Questions ?
● Website: http://LibreTime.org
● My email – robbt@azone.org
● My github: https://github.com/robbt
● LibreTime repo:
http://github.com/libretime/libretime