Installation#

⚠️ Radiotomate is still in beta. Some bugs may remain and it lacks some features we'd like to have in a genuine "V1". But it is already quite stable and upcoming versions will be able to update existing installs, so you can already give it a try.

Requirements#

  • Some music and jingles - at least one of each!
  • Disk space requirements depends on the average quality (and length) of music and episodes you'll broadcast, but also how often you want to clean up old sounds. Radiotomate's containers use a bit more than 2GB, so you need a few GB to test. In production, something between 100GB and 1TB should be comfortable.
  • A computer or a light virtual machine dedicated to that automation. We recommend Debian or Ubuntu.

Install#

Open a terminal. Copy-paste the following command an press enter:

wget -O - https://radiotomate.org/install.sh | bash

This command will download the program, it might need your password (if it needs to sudo apt install podman). Then the terminal will show you the link to the installer, copy-paste that link in a browser or click on it while holding Ctrl:

screenshot of a terminal showing the link

Notes for perticular cases:

If you are installing on a remote machine Replace localhost in the link by the correct hostname or IP address.
If you prefer to install Radiotomate in a specific folder (or mount point) cd to this folder before launching the installation.
If you checked "This is a test installation" Radiotomate will not start when you reboot your machine, and you will not have access to radiotomate and beet commands from a shell.
This option performs a less intrusive installation. It is easier to uninstall (see the bottom of the page), but would be harder to use as a permanent radio later: you would have to restore your test radio on a new one, except the .kube file.
If all you have is Windows You can test Radiotomate thanks to WSL. Start Powershell and type: 
wsl --install
Choose a username and a password, after the installation close Powershell and start wsl to have a terminal where you can follow our instructions (starting from `wget ...`).
When clicking on the link to the installer, you'll have to replace "localhost" by WSL's IP address: find it by opening another PowerShell window, and typing `wsl.exe hostname -i`. Rewrite the link like `http://123.123.123.123:6801/?t=abc...`.
Radiotomate will not start automatically at boot (contact us if you know how to do that). After your test, you can remove WSL as a whole by typing in Powershell: 
wsl --unregister Ubuntu
wsl --uninstall

If later on you want to stop the application, type in the same terminal:

systemctl --user stop radiotomate

If you want to start (or restart) the application, type:

systemctl --user restart radiotomate

Things to do after the installation#

  • Start by creating a jingles cart that contains at least one sound.
  • Copy some music files to the radiotomate_data/MusicDropbox folder. In less than a minute these files should move to radiotomate_data/Music and start playing.
  • Add music via the Web application, create auto-DJ slots and carts to experiment Radiotomate's unique playback logic.
  • Share access to other people in your radio by creating user accounts. Before that:

The interface is started behind port 6811, but it is not secured (as the s in HTTPS) and maybe blocked by your firewall. If you want to access the application via the Internet, you need to setup a Web server to proxy port 6811. On a machine dedicated to streaming, we advise you set-up Caddy. You probably also want to proxy port 6800, where Radiotomate is listening for a live stream.

You can also review configuration options to improve Radiotomate's integration with your radio's software. Later on, consider our recommended maintenance measures.

In case of trouble#

If the system is not starting, see the maintainance section.

Copy everything that appeared in the terminal, and paste it along your message when asking for help

Uninstalling#

If you only wanted to do a short-lived test of Radiotomate (thanks!) you can get back to a clean state by running the following commands:

systemctl --user disable radiotomate.service
systemctl --user stop radiotomate.service
rm ~/.config/containers/systemd/radiotomate*
podman image prune -a
rm -rf radiotomate_data

You can also add sudo apt prune podman.

If you did not check "This is a test installation", you will also have to

  • remove beet and radiotomate aliases added at the end of your bash start-up script
  • disable systemd lingering: sudo loginctl disable-linger