Sourcefabric has announced the release of version 2.0 of Airtime, its open source radio management software. According to its developers, the focus of the major update was to "reduce the time and effort station managers and DJs spent on behind-the-scenes work".

With Airtime 2.0, users can now configure Icecast and SHOUTcast streams, and change the hardware output API (ALSA, OSS, AO, Pulseaudio, and Portaudio) from directly within the web interface. A new live preview mode has also been added to allow users to listen to their streams from the web interface instead of having to use a third-party application like VLC.



Airtime 2.0 in action

Source: Sourcefabric Error checking in playlists has been improved for situations where two users are editing the same data, and the intermediate "Add Playlist" screen that required users to add a name and description of the playlist has been removed as it "wasn't necessary since everything could be changed from the playlist editor itself". The calendar view is more customisable, saving settings directly in the calendar and adding the ability to change the day a week starts on.

Other changes include the ability to upload any clip to SoundCloud (previous versions only allowed recorded shows to be uploaded), adding access to the time and service monitoring settings in the web interface, and a fix for a bug in Media Monitor that could lead to import failure when Airtime began reading a file before it had finished copying. Security has also been improved: now, following three failed login attempts, users are presented with a CAPTCHA from Google's reCAPTCHA service to protect against brute-force attacks.



Scheduling in Airtime

Source: Sourcefabric Airtime is a server application which allows users, from any modern web browser, to upload audio, create playlists with drag and drop, incorporate track transitions, build complete shows and then schedule them for transmission. Developed by Sourcefabric, a Czech non-profit organisation, it is used by a number of radio stations including London's Resonance FM, Poland's Bieszczady FM and Senegal's West Africa Democracy Radio.

Ahead of the new release, last week Sourcefabric introduced Airtime Pro, its hosted version of Airtime that includes online storage space and maintenance and technical support. The service starts at $49.95 per month for 10 GB of online storage and one stream; the Enterprise package costs $249.95 per month and includes 3 concurrent streams and 500 GB of storage.

More details about the major update can be found in the official release announcement and in the change log. Airtime 2.0 is available to download from Sourcefabric.org; an online demo and installation instructions are provided. According to the release notes, there is one known issue with version 2.0 related to uploading large files using Firefox on Ubuntu 10.04, but a workaround is provided. Hosted on GitHub, source code for Airtime is licensed under the GPLv3.

(crve)