Bowling Green is a tertiary city in Kentucky where I went to college and met a beautiful group of people. BG has a grip of talented musicians creating art and performing live.
As I transplant to BG, I got to know some of these people, and heard from them about the previous eras of music in BG, and their musical influences that are no longer active.
This experience led to me to create an database of local bands and musicians, reach out to them and get their permission to stream their music.
Iteration 1: Youtube Stream
The first version of bgrad.io was a 24/7 Youtube stream. These streams were popular at the time with beats to relax/study to leading the charge.
V1 was composed of some node scripts, a web interface, and OBS. I had a poor little Mac mini chugging away in my office for days at a time. Uptime was decent, but occasionally the next song would not play due to bugs in the node scripts.
The Youtube stream had some cool features:
- 🖼️ Album art display
- 🏃♂️➡️ Art and title animation
- 🎼 Album and artist information
- 🎥 Music videos support when available
- 🧑🏫 Interesting facts displayed per album and artist
Iteration 2: Azuracast Server
Eventually, I got tired having to host the stream locally in my own home. Occasional connection issues as well as network and power usage was less than ideal. To say nothing of the eventual copyright strikes I would attract on Youtube, despite having explicit permission from the rights holders.
So I looked into rebuilding bgrad.io as a hostable internet radio station. I found Azuracast, a great easy to roll streaming solution. I tossed it on a Digital Ocean droplet and redid the website, and let people know.
The response was much greater this time, and people shared how they enjoyed getting to rediscover artists they hadn't heard in decades.
Hopefully I revive this again in some form or another one day.