Liquidsoap 0.3.7 is out !

We eventually released liquidsoap 0.3.7 !!

For those who don’t know about this software, liquidsoap is a scripting language designed for building audio streams. It was initially aimed at web radios, as an alternative shoucast/icecast source client, but quickly turned to a much more general tool.

For those who read debaday, I already blogged about it few months before. There, you’ll find more explanations on how the program operates.

A simple example could be:

 #!/usr/bin/liquidsoap
# Disable some logging options
set("log.file", false)
# Listen to a lastfm stream
s = input.lastfm("lastfm://globaltags/jazz")
# Stream to local soundcard
out(s)
# Stream to an icecast server
output.icecast.vorbis(host="foo", password="bar",
                     mount="jazz", mksafe(s))

Using this simple script, you’ll be able to connect to a Last.fm stream, play it on your local sound card as well as sending it to an icecast mountpoint.

The availabe operators, audio formats and audio input/outputs are now quite important and could surely be of some interest for you.

The good advantage of using a scripting language is that it will allow virtually anything you desire, hence being much more flexible than an application using configuration files. The drawback of this is that you need to actually learn the language. But we expect the language not to be so difficult, and the documentation to help a bit. We also try to be helpfull on IRC and in the mailing lists..

Besides, the expressiveness of a programming language allows the script programmer to explore many different usages than the simple source client. For instance, we have used the language to write an mpg/ogg123 clone, as well as a stream ripper.

Of course, as liquidsoap is written using ocaml, the scripting language enjoys some of the outstanding advantages of functional programming, like static types, type inference and functional values.

But, we expect liquidsoap to be usable also for users interested in web radio streaming and, hopefully, popularize functional programming outside of the community.

It’s also interesting to see OCaml used for an application dedicated to audio processing and streaming, since it’s not usual, and proves the language can be also really useful outside of the theoretical language scope it is often seen in.

The 0.3.7 release fixes a lot of bugs but also adds several nice enhancements, such as:

• New fancy and nice looking website and documentation
• Rewritten jack support
• Can receive streams from icecast and shoutcast source clients
• Official last.fm client for both listening to radios and submitting via audioscrobbler
• A lot of usefull functions in the language

Debian packages for this release have been uploaded recently and should hopefully be available for testing users, and probably ubuntu too.

If you want more informations on liquidsoap, you can try the following links:

• Website: http://savonet.sf.net/
• IRC: #savonet on irc.freenode.org
• Trac: http://savonet.rastageeks.org/
• Mailing lists. In particular savonet-users