In this project I managed to incorporate nearly all of my favourite techie things into one! Music, radio, web programming and audio streaming… They all come together in this project, myradiojukebox.com
The front-end is a website designed in PHP which hooks up to a back-end playout and streaming system.
The idea is that the user can access the website and search through a catalogue of music and seamlessly make requests via the front-end part of the website. The search facility queries a MySQL database held on the server, if the song exists, the info is relayed back to the playout system running on the same server and the song is put into a queue to be played in the next available slot. While there are no requests, the system just plays music randomly until a request is made.
The front-end website also queries an external database to gather the artists images and bio and an Amazon ‘Buy this song’ link and dynamically inserts them into the site.
The playout system simultaneously streams to three streaming servers, a 128kbps MP3 stream for the desktop/broadband browsers and listeners and also to two AAC streams for mobile users (24kbps and 48kbps) which are listed on TuneIn.
All requests are sent to the websites Facebook and Twitter accounts so that users can share their requests and it also includes a periodic Facebook and Twitter automatic update with what is currently playing.
Fancy trying it out? Visit myradiojukebox.com
and request your own song!
Next for this project is a voting system for users to vote up or down songs they hear and a login system to store their favourite songs.