Some Background#
In 2011, my cousin was working as an audio engineer at a community radio station, Life FM, and he wanted some help with the IT systems and support. I promptly started volunteering and quickly I became acutely aware of the lack of resources available to community radio, in addition to the strict rules of conduct that they are required to follow. Seven years later, my cousin has since moved on to other things, and I’m still volunteering - although not as often as those early years.
A New Radio Station#
In 2015, Life FM launched a second station - Lift Radio - I was involved with all the technical details as I was employed part-time by the station at the time. I designed an Audio Over IP solution on a shoestring budget, enabling the new station to broadcast over DAB+, with out an analog connection in sight (all other parts of the broadcast system were analog at the time).
Alongside launching the station on DAB+, we decided to also provide a web simulcast. After shopping around for some, and with no knowledge of how many listeners could be expected, it became apparent that a streaming service could be costly, especially as we wanted to provide a high bitrate (128Kbps) MP3 stream and a lower bitrate (64Kbps), many providers just don’t allow for a variable number of listeners or multiple streams. After much research, I proposed that the easiest and cheapest course of action was to purchase a VPS and run our own system. That gave us a low entry cost, the ability to monitor our own usage, and the flexibility to scale the solution, if necessary.
Pre-launch#
Fast forward about 18 months (late 2016) and I was approached to provide the same service for another station. A few weeks of development later and I had a usable system. A few more stations were interested and so I further developed the system and provided for those stations. During this time, I solved two challenges for this kind of system that can’t be addressed well when deploying on a budget, redundancy and scalability. The redundancy is solved by using a service that offers a ‘floating IP’ and using cloud technology to shield the end user from any system failure. This solved part of the redundancy problem, and I wrote some custom software that automatically monitors and changes listener stream destinations in real time, which also allows for load-balancing and a very high level of scalability, again all transparent to the end user.
Launch#
In late 2017, I decided to brand the service and release it to the wider community. Sigile was officially launched on 1st March 2018, offering Icecast services tailored to Australian community radio stations.