LibreTime Reviews

1. Cristian

   | One of the guys at Rock Now Radio | almost 3 years ago
   Be prepared to face the terminal

   Running for some (4) years Airtime 2.5.2 (latest free version), now moving to LibreTime because of various runtime (unsupported PHP too old etc.). My description also includes the (painfully) migration of the existing database, so new users might read that part as a story.

   Installation

   Nothing fancy, install OS (Ubuntu 18.04), git and curl are probably already there or at the distance of an sudo apt -y git curl, install icecast and apache2 (or whatever the web server you might need if you plan to pump the stream in a web page), then read the Libre docs, clone the repo and install -fiap.

   Do NOT use Ubuntu later than 18.04 (so no 20) because it will not work.

   Back to installer: did not work 100% mainly because of the post install setup (the web part), which have the habit of not saving the changed password for admin and others, so a nano visit to /etc/airtime/airtime.conf and on liquidsoap might be needed. Also /etc/airtime/icecast_pass might need tweaking as well.

   So I had to stop everything (service apache2 stop, libretime runtime as well), change the passwords to match icecast, move airtime.conf to a backup location and rerun the web part, which worked perfectly.

   [optional] Move of existing airtime database

   Files moved from another server to this new one, 70 GB, rsync, grab a coffee (ok, more than one) and copy everything in the exact same default location (/srv/airtime/stor/). All good. Database move: complete pain. My setup is postgres, which does not support select from one database and insert in another, and the dblink postgres specific thing sucks ass. Also, postgres is quite slow, database fields slightly differs, so I had to export in a CSV the airtime tables (ccfiles, cchistory, ccshow etc.) Some of the tables had around 700.000 rows and I had to do manual SQL in order to map the old existing foreign keys over the new ones - took one day but all good.

   The run

   My setup is one main (webserver + icecast) machine - which acts also as a relay for the second machine - and libretime sits on a second machine. Although the interface is relatively different than what airtime 2.5.2 has, I was able to setup the params, stream, schedule shows etc. in no time. The dragging of tracks into the right panel does not respect the UI (meaning I am dragging between songs 100 and 101 but I end up with the new track somewhere below some rows) but I can live with that. The same limitation of a show that cannot have more than 24 hours is present, but other than that, everything it is running for a week now on a 4 GB RAM machine with CPU sitting most of the time in one digit. Import is very quick, smart blocks is a killer, and it works.

   Conclusion

   Although is not a stable release and is probably driven by a handful of guys having another jobs and doing changes in the spare time, it is a good fork which runs. Be comfortable with ssh and terminal because you might need to do this, especially when integrating with web servers, certbot, redirecting streams to HTTPS, making Icecast SSL-aware etc. But that's how Linux infrastructure is running, so no complains here.

   🏁 Competitors: Sourcefabric Airtime, Airtime, Sourcefabric Airtime Pro, AzuraCast

   👍 Pros:    Free|Quick|Community|Minimal documentation|Source-code

   👎 Cons:    Alpha|Setup|Migration

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LibreTime mentions (1)

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