AzuraCast @azuracast@fosstodon.org

For our Mastodon friends, meet our wonderful mascot, Azura Ruisselante! She's a unicorn with a knack for broadcasting. She was created by the amazingly talented @tysontanx@twitter.com, and is a loving tribute to our project's original roots as a MLP-specific media host called Ponyville Live. The project is very, very different today, and supports stations of all types from around the world, but we never forget our roots!

Minor layout changes in today's update: the secondary color on light themes has been changed from orange to gray (the orange was...a bit much) and the public player/embed pages have had their player controls updated to look more like a standard web radio player.

New options from Liquidsoap that are now editable directly in AzuraCast:
- Support for "Smart" crossfading that considers the volumes of the two tracks to determine the best fade method,
- Support for compression and normalization (the "nrj" function)
- Replaygain metadata

The latest bare-metal ("traditional") update works again on 16.04, but it has to build the latest version of OCaml from source, so installation times are fairly long (15 mins). Using 18.04 bare-metal is faster, but Docker (on any host OS) is the fastest and most supported option.

If you're on our Docker installation and want to stick with tagged releases, now you don't have to keep adding "--release" to every command. You can add this line to azuracast.env:

PREFER_RELEASE_BUILDS=true

...to always use release builds even without the flag specified.

Another new feature rounding out this week's development: you can now put a playlist in "Jingle Mode", which will play its contents regularly but hide its metadata from listeners and the AzuraCast API. This is useful especially for station identification jingles, ads, etc.

Is your station sending too many tweets? Is Twitter telling you to "enhance your calm"? Now you can set a custom rate limit for the Twitter web hook, so it will only send one message in the time range you specify.

New feature: we now support 2-factor authentication for all user accounts. 2FA improves your account security by requiring a one-time code that's generated by an app on your smartphone (FreeOTP, Authy, etc.) or any other TOTP-compatible program. Enable from your account profile.

The latest traditional update switches us to OPAM2 for newer, more stable builds of Liquidsoap. Note that the update builds the necessary files from source and may take upwards of 15-20 minutes.

If you use our (recommended) Docker install, installing and updating is MUCH faster!

Playlist management from the Media Files page has been greatly simplified. The "clear playlists" and "add to playlist" buttons have been replaced by a new "Set Playlists" one that lets you choose existing playlists (or none to clear playlists) or create a new one.

We've reached another milestone: 400 stars on GitHub! Thank you to everyone who supports our project. We hope we've been able to, and continue to, make a positive impact in the world of web radio.

Please keep in mind that AzuraCast is free software built by a very small team of developers who are unpaid (except through friendly donations). We are always working to improve your experience and add new features. Thank you for your patience and continued support!

Friendly reminder: we accept donations through Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/AzuraCast) and Ko-fi (https://ko-fi.com/silvereagle) and are very grateful for any support. Donations do not guarantee completion of requested features. Please contact us to sponsor development on specific features.

Update: We were able to build an updated version of our web_v2 image which resolves the cron tasks issue. If you've updated within the last day, you should update again to receive the fixed image.

We are aware of some issues running regular cron tasks using our latest web_v2 Docker image; we're working on deploying a newer version of the image, but the Docker Hub is experiencing significant outages tonight preventing us from publishing the new version. We will update ASAP.

The latest update adds both direct links to our new "Help" page and a quick theme switcher to our top-right dropdown menu. This will let you much more easily switch between our dark and light themes.

And yes, in case you didn't know before, we do have a dark theme!

Building and maintaining AzuraCast is a full-time job! There are new features to build, issues to diagnose and fix, and support to provide to users around the world.

Help us keep this software free! Support us on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/AzuraCast or at https://ko-fi.com/silvereagle

Minor release update 0.9.3 is out, with several minor bug fixes and improvements. This is our first release on Composer's Packagist repository, which we will soon be using to manage updates on our Docker installations. https://github.com/AzuraCast/AzuraCast/releases/tag/0.9.3

An update to how we work with Liquidsoap means we no longer need the secondary "station-watcher" app, and now both manual AutoDJ and "advanced" playlists can take advantage of our rich metadata support on the web interface and in now-playing API responses.

AzuraCast version 0.9.2 has been released, which includes the new Web DJ feature, per-station file quotas and dozens of security and bug fixes. See the full release notes here: https://github.com/AzuraCast/AzuraCast/releases/tag/0.9.2

Streamer/DJ updates: We've updated the WebDJ to be compatible with Chrome's new requirements for user interaction before starting audio, and made DJ silence detection and auto-disconnection a configurable option on station profiles.