¶ Overview
Lawless.FM is a free and open-source self hosted web radio management suite. We are a fork of the Azuracast broadcasting platform which benefits from the communities updates. What is Lawless.FM? Lawless.FM installs everything you need to get a web radio station up and running in minutes. Lawless FM is a self-hosted, all-in-one web radio management suite. Using it is easy, as it has a powerful but intuitive web interface that lets you start up a fully working web radio station literally within a few minutes.
Lawless.FM works for web radio stations of all types and sizes, and is built to run on even the most affordable VPS web hosts.
Lawless.FM is currently in beta.
Web radio stations already run Lawless.FM, but keeping your server up-to-date with the latest code from our Gitlab repository is strongly recommended for security as bug fixes and new features are often released. It's unlikely, but updates may result in unexpected issues or data loss, so always make sure to keep your station's media files backed up in a second location.To install Lawless.FM, you should have a basic understanding of the Linux shell terminal. Once installed, every aspect of your radio station can be managed via Lawless.FM's web interface.
¶ Core Features
¶ For Radio Stations
- Rich Media Management: Upload songs, edit metadata, preview songs and organize music into folders from your browser.
- Playlists: Add music to standard-rotation playlists (in sequential or shuffled playback order) or schedule a playlist to play at a scheduled time, or once per x songs/minutes/etc.
- Live DJs: Set up individual DJ/streamer accounts and see who's currently streaming from your station's profile page.
- Web DJ: Broadcast live directly from your browser, with no extra software needed, with Lawless.FM's built-in Web DJ tool.
- Public Pages: Lawless.FM includes embeddable public pages that you can integrate into your existing web page or use as the basis for your own customized player.
- Listener Requests: Let your listeners request specific songs from your playlists, both via an API and a simple public-facing listener page.
- Remote Relays: Broadcast your radio signal (including live DJs) to any remote server running Icecast or SHOUTcast.
- Web Hooks: Integrate your station with Slack, Discord, TuneIn, Twitter and more by setting up web hooks that connect to third-party services.
- Detailed Analytics and Reports: Keep track of every aspect of your station's listeners over time. View reports of each song's impact on your listener count. You can also generate a report that's compatible with SoundExchange for US web radio royalties.
¶ For Server Administrators
- Role-based User Management: Assign global and per-station permissions to a role, then add users to those roles to control access.
- Custom Branding: Modify every aspect of both the internal and public-facing Lawless.FM pages by supplying your own custom CSS and JavaScript.
- Authenticated RESTful API: Individual users in the system can create API keys which have the same permissions they have in the system. The Lawless.FM API is a powerful and well-documented tool for interacting with installations.
- Web Log Viewing: Quickly diagnose problems affecting any part of the Lawless.FM system through the system-wide web log viewer.
- Automatic Radio Proxies: Many users can't connect directly to radio station ports (i.e. 8000) by default, so Lawless.FM includes an automatic nginx proxy that lets listeners connect via the http (80) and https (443) ports. These proxies are also compatible with services like CloudFlare.
- Storage Location Management: Station media, live recordings and backups can be stored locally or on an S3 compatible storage provider.
¶ What's Inside?
Lawless.FM will automatically retrieve and install these components for you:
¶ Radio Software
- Liquidsoap as the always-playing "AutoDJ"
- Icecast 2.4 as a radio broadcasting frontend (Icecast-KH installed on supported platforms)
For x86/x64 installations, SHOUTcast 2 DNAS can also be used
as a broadcasting frontend. SHOUTcast is non-free software and does not come bundled with Lawless.FM, but can be installed via the administration panel after Lawless.FM has been installed.
¶ Supporting Software
- NGINX for serving web pages and the radio proxy
- MariaDB as the primary database
- PHP 8.0 powering the web application
- Redis for sessions, message queue storage, database and general caching
¶ Lawless.FM API
Once installed and running, Lawless.FM exposes an API that allows you to monitor and interact with your stations.
Documentation about this API and its endpoints are available on
the Lawless.FM API Documentation.
¶ License
Lawless FM is licensed under the Apache license, version 2.0. This project is free and open-source software, and pull requests are always welcome.