During a cold weekend in Brussels, over 8000 people gathered for the annual FOSDEM event to listen to talks from experts across a range of subjects. The EBU was again there, helping to organise the Open Media Devroom, showcasing projects and topics for open source media and broadcasting.
Interest was high, and the room was full to capacity for a large part of the day.
...
Open Source Radio Station
One of the last presentations of the day was from the George Kiagiadakis of the University of Crete (UoC), who detailed how they had put together a community-run radio station built around the concepts of DIY and Open Source. This included tools for generating an FM MPX feed with RDS encoding, gathering and distributing onair metadata, an efficient audio logger, and ways to automate and simplify production workflows for radio stations with limited resources.
The use of Open Source software in key parts of the FM broadcast chain, as well as in the management of the station and its content, opens up the ability to create radio services to a wider range of communities. Alongside similar tools for DAB Digital Radio, getting on-air is becoming simpler.