Overview & Features

The following diagram outlines the main elements of AURA.

The naming scheme

Automated Radio, AutoRadio, AuRa or AURA, follows an “Automobile-naming-scheme”. All the components are named after some crucial parts of a car:

  • Steering: This is the single source of thruth, holding all the radio data, hence steering some radio’s broadcast.

  • Tank: Just spleen without steam. That’s where your shows, tunes and recordings are managed. Fuelling your broadcast with materials.

  • Dashboard: Observe and control what’s happening. That’s the backend user interface of your radio with individual views for hosts and programme managers.

  • Engine: The playout server allowing you to broadcast via FM and web audio streams. Includes silence detection and optional recording options.

  • Play: Every car has some fancy Auto Radio Player. And every radio station has the need for some modern frontend experience. Play is a library of web components. Making web development a breeze. Just like playing with blocks of Lego.

AURA Steering AURA Dashboard AURA Tank AURA Engine AURA Play

Features

The aforementioned naming scheme is used as a basis for name-spacing individual services.

Here you get an overview of the features of the provided services.

Find details on additional functionality on the bundle documentation pages or in the configuration files of individual services.

Steering

/* to be defined */

Dashboard

/* to be defined */

Dashboard Clock

Web Application providing a Studio Clock.

/* more to be defined */

Tank

/* to be defined */

Tank Cut & Glue

/* to be defined */

Engine

Scheduling and control for the playout.

  • Scheduler: Automatically broadcast your radio programme (see AURA Dashboard for a user interface to do scheduling)

  • Autonomous playout: Schedule information is pulled from Steering into a local cache. This way the playout keeps working, even when the network connectivity might be lost.

  • Versatile Playlists: Playlists can contain different content types, such as audio files, audio streams and line in channels of you audio interface.

  • Default Playlists: Define playlists on show and schedule level, in addition to any timeslot specific playlists. This way you always have an playlist assigned, when some host forgets about scheduling a specific programme.

  • Heartbeat Monitoring: Frequently send pulse to a monitoring server, ensuring your schedule and playout server is up and running.

/* more to be defined */

Engine Core

The playout server based on Liquidsoap.

  • Multi-channel input: Play audio from various sources including queues, streams and line-in from the audio interface

  • Multi-channel output: Output to line out or audio streams

  • Icecast connectivity: Stream to an Icecast Server, provide different encoding formats and bitrates

  • Auto DJ triggered by Silence Detector: Play fallback audio triggered by a silence detector to avoid Dead Air. Play randomized music from a folder or M3U playlist.

  • Metadata handling: Send information on playlogs via REST calls to external services like Engine API.

  • ReplayGain: Normalization done using passed ReplayGain meta data.

Engine API

An OpenAPI 3 service to store and retrieve Engine data.

/* more to be defined */

Engine Recorder

A simple but powerful recorder.

  • Bulk Recorder: Record blocks of audio for archiving, audit-logging or further processing

  • Sync to archive: Periodically synchronize recordings to a defined destination