Radio

TuneCamp can broadcast a single always-on radio station from your own library. It transcodes a queue of tracks into a looping HLS stream that anyone can tune into — in the browser at /radio, or in any external player via an M3U or podcast-style RSS feed.

There is one station per instance. Only admins start and stop it; listening is public.

How it works

When you start the station, TuneCamp resolves the selected sources into a queue of tracks, writes an FFmpeg concat playlist, and spawns FFmpeg to produce a rolling HLS stream (-stream_loop -1, so the queue repeats forever). Listeners pull the HLS playlist; the station survives a server restart and resumes automatically (see Monitoring for process health).

Local files only. The radio can only broadcast tracks that have a real audio file on the server. Cloud (gdrive://), external, and network tracks have no local file and are silently skipped. If none of your picks have a local file, starting the station fails with a clear error.

Building a station (Admin → Radio)

1. Open Admin Panel → Radio.
2. Give the station a name.
3. Pick its content. You can combine, with checkboxes, any number of:
   • Your playlists — the custom playlists on the instance.
   • Genre mixes — one dynamic mix per genre in your library (e.g. Rock Mix, Jazz Mix). These are computed live from every track tagged with that genre — you don't have to maintain them. Tracks from all selected sources are merged into one queue, with duplicates removed (a track in two picks plays once).
4. Optionally enable Shuffle queue.
5. Click Start Radio.

The selection is persisted, so after a server restart the station resumes and re-resolves each source fresh — newly added tracks in a chosen playlist or genre are picked up automatically on the next restart.

To change the line-up, Stop the station and start it again with a new selection.

Listening

Where	URL
In-browser player	/radio
HLS stream (VLC, mpv, web players)	/api/radio/hls/stream.m3u8
M3U playlist (VLC, foobar2000)	/api/radio/stream.m3u
Podcast/RSS feed (Pocket Casts, AntennaPod)	/api/radio/feed.rss

The /radio page also shows the current track and a live listener count.

API

See API Contracts → Radio for the full endpoint list. The admin endpoint accepts a sources array mixing numeric playlist ids and genre:<name> ids:

POST /api/radio/start
{
  "name": "Late Night Mix",
  "sources": ["12", "genre:ambient", "genre:jazz"],  // playlist #12 + two genre mixes
  "shuffle": true
}

playlistId (single) and an explicit trackIds array are still accepted for backward compatibility; when sources is present it takes precedence.