Whisper Radio

IceCast radio station of a TTS (espeak) reading off:

• Random text file
• RSS headline
• Weather data (METAR)
• Random music file
• Reads the "freshest" thread on gopherden (gopher://gopher.someodd.zip:7070/)
• MOTD: a message you want to consistently be read
• Some Masstodon/Fosstodon data
• Responds to the latest post under a specific hashtag on fosstodon (uses AI)

"Whisper" is a reference to the espeak voice or whatever used.

Please also see the showcase post I made about this on my blog. It has some tips for troubleshooting and setting up an Icecast2 server.

Here's a demo/the official Whisper Radio stream, you may be able to open in your browser or a media player: https://radio.someodd.zip/stream

Be sure to do this then edit the files before you begin:

cp ezstream.example.xml ezstream.xml
cp config.example.sh config.sh

Now being used by Bitreich!

Included examples

• Poetry by Emily Dickinson
• Hacker Manifesto from Phrak Magazine
• Some poem reading I found on Internet Archive
• Some feeds (RSS/Atom)

Dependencies

• espeak
• jq
• xmlstarlet
• curl
• ezstream
• icecast2
• metar
• piper-tts
• ffmpeg

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install espeak jq curl ezstream icecast2 metar ffmpeg pipx ffmpeg xmlstarlet
pipx install piper-tts

piper-tts setup

Download:

• The JSON for the hfc_female Piper voice
• The hfc_female Piper voice
• Check out the supported voices for Piper

You may have to open a new terminal for it to be in the path.

icecast2 set up

Install icecast2. It asked me to optionally input some info through the TUI. For my example/demo I chose hackme (source password, relay password, admin password [this is extremely bad practice]). I also entered localhost.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install icecast2

Edit sudo vi /etc/icecast2/icecast.xml.

sudo systemctl start icecast2

To persist the server:

sudo systemctl enable icecast2

I RECOMMEND YOU USE LOW LOW LOW MP3 STREAMING SETTINGS, MONO ETC

Copy the repo

git clone https://github.com/someodd/whisper-radio
cd whisper-radio

Run the script for first time + send with ezstream

./whisper.sh

Crontab

How often to poll or...

Use crontab -e, run every five minutes and log:

*/5 * * * * /path/to/whisper.sh > /path/to/logfile 2>&1

Troubleshooting

I had this problem where I thought the project was broken but I restarted computer and it works again. careful how kill ezstream maybe.

Tips

Link music from an archive of some musician to the possible audio sources, to avoid duplication:

sudo find /foo/bar/some-legal-music-archive -name "*.mp3" -exec ln -s {} ./audio/ \;