Support for multiple radio stations?

[nonsavant]

Hi, first of all I just want to say thank you! This is a perfectly simple solution for my problem, after having switched from vtuner to ycast, my Onkyo still couldn't play the HLS streams from the BBC.

Just a question or feature request: Any possibility of supporting multiple stations? If I understand the configuration correctly, I would currently have to fire up a new container for each station, which doesn't feel very scalable.

[paulgalow]

Hi @nonsavant, glad to hear this is useful for you. You ask a very valid question. I have been thinking about adding support for multiple stations and have decided to just spin up multiple containers for now. Some of the arguments I came up with are:

More maintenance for the user
One downside of spinning up multiple containers is more maintenance work for the user, since they have to keep track of multiple containers instead of just one.

Keep configuration simple
Adding multiple stations adds potential friction/confusion if the configuration relies on environment variables. Adding multiple stations with their respective output paths and potential custom bitrates would become unwieldy if relying on environment variables. An alternative approach could be to introduce a configuration file to store the list of stations but then again you lose some of the simplicity of just deploying it with a one-liner.

Very little overhead of running multiple containers
I run an instance of racoder in fly.io and typically see a memory footprint of 60 to 90 MB of RAM for my small use cases. So right now, it seems like a pretty small overhead to start another container for another station.

I'll keep my eyes open to see if there's more demand for this feature.

[Gazz1e]

I'd like to see support for multiple stations. Like @nonsavant I am also using a ycast to stream, but to my Denon Ceol and BBC streams aren't supported.

It would be ideal if handleStream() could be modified to accept an optional URL querystring parameter that allowed a input stream to passed in. I've had a go at making the change myself but my newbie node.js aren't good enough yet.