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Created February 19, 2017 14:10
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LibreTime: A Fork of AirTime due to stalled development

LibreTime: A Fork of AirTime due to stalled development

Dear AirTime community,

As Sourcefabric mentioned in their recent statement, their development efforts are concentrating on the SaaS offering of Airtime.pro. For a while now, changes are not being merged back into the open source branch of AirTime and the branches have started to diverge heavily. While Sourcefabric in principle wants to continue to support the open source branch of AirTime, they are prohibited from doing so for financial reasons. Effectively, the development of the open source version of AirTime has come to a stop.

We as broadcasters depend on a continuously updated and maintained version of AirTime. Sourcefabric offered three solutions in their statement: 1) Wait for them to have time to merge SaaS features back to the open source version 2) Start using the SaaS offering Airtime.pro 3) Fork AirTime and continue development independently.

For the last two years, we have hoped for solution 1. However, since no progress seems to have been made, we have decided to fork the project. This will enable us to coordinate our development efforts and will enable AirTime to continue to evolve as an open source, on-premises solution.

The undersigned contributors have begun undertaking the necessary steps to start this endeavour under the moniker ''LibreTime''. We aim to create a community managed radio solution with an active developer community that is both easy to install and use. There is also a taiga where we have started to coordinate.

We invite everyone to join our efforts of becoming a friendly inclusive community of stations from around the globe that use, document and improve LibreTime. Join us in fixing bugs and in defining how we manage the codebase going forward.

We believe that AirTime offers a solid foundation for an excellent online and terrestrial radio broadcast infrastructure, and are very grateful that Sourcefabric offered it to the world in the spirit of libre and open source software. In this same spirit, we aim to use this offer and adapt it to our current needs. If in future Sourcefabric has the capacity to spend developer time on merging features back from their SaaS-branch or offer any other kind of collaboration, we are very open to discuss any potential for cooperation as it arises.

Kind Regards,

Lucas Bickel, Radio Bern RaBe

Robb Ebright, WCRS-LP

Markus Roth, Radio Bern RaBe

Jean-Marie Favreau, Radio Campus Clermont-Ferrand

@teestyman
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Is there a community or forum for Libretime users?
It is a challenge to make this work but there is no need to make the mistakes others made.

Regards
Philip

@kmahelona
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We're at the point of ditching Airtime and moving to RCS ($25k to get over the line then $1k/month) but stumbling on LibreTime... maybe that's not necessary! I'd love to help out. Alas I work for a small charity so my time is so limited but I will definitely make an effort!

Airtime Pro doesn't have the features/back-end access that we need in order to use airtime for our terrestrial broadcasting. We were trialling and basically their clients are mainly in the US side of the world so they couldn't do anything to help us (e.g. maintenance schedules would affect our broadcasts midday!).

Check us out @tehikumedia and https://tehiku.nz for our radio stream.

@hairmare
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Hi @kmahelona

Your comment reminded me that it makes sense to post a quick update to the project here for people that find out about LibreTime this way... Most of the links in the letter to the community above aren't really what people would need to get into the community nowadays.

The main docs are now on https://libretime.org. The place for questions and general discussion of LibreTime ist on our Discourse and development as well as issue tracking takes place in the main LibreTime git repo for the most part.

If you want to get started with figuring out how to best migrate to LibreTime you should probably first set up a test machine so you can check if LibreTime already fit your needs. The are some install docs and also some developer vagrant setup docs. If you plan on using LibreTime in production you should always read the release notes from the releases page. They usually contain valuable information and possibly manual migration steps.

Good luck with your migration to either LibreTime or RCS. If you have any further questions or run into any issues when trying out or migrating to LibreTime, feel free to reach out to the community at the above links.

Cheers,
Lucas

@allegfede
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If you want, i could help in integrating RDS in FM and DAB+ outputting.
For dab+ i also made some multiplexers (more stations are mixed togheter in a single digital radio channel) for local radio stations in Italy.

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