Stream stability for production usage

Hi, we are a small radio/television broadcasting company
Some of our radiostations get sattelite signal on one location but the transmitters are in another
Currently we are using BARIX Instreamer and Exstreamers to send audio over lan. Some of the Exstreamers are malfunctioning tho, and we are looking for an alternative since in our economy Barix is no longer a viable solution because of their pricing.

So I got an idea to try out raspberry pi.
The main task for it is to get a stream from a local ip, and route it to analog output
Im currently testing “RaspyFi” and the stream has been going good for 1300 minutes.
My question is, has someone tested the stability of it? If our target is for it to just stream that for 24/7 all around the year.

Perhaps someone has suggestions on how to fail proof the distro, or recommend something that i could do to increase stability of the system.

Please keep in mind that this is analog radio, and the stream is like 4 bit, 48 kHz, 160 kbps so we dont need to use DACS or anything like that, RaPi’s standart complectation is good enough for our needs.

I guess that Volumio is ‘overpowered’ for your use-case.

First, I would look at a different cheap (maybe even x86) board which has a proper- and dedicated LAN chip as you are getting your data over the LAN. The Pi uses an USB-on-the-go chip and than also an LAN-to-USB converter for the LAN, meaning that the LAN is going over the USB port. This doesn’t help on the stream (actually network/IP) stability side of things.

Second, use a minimal OS without any running unneeded daemons like webservers, dhclient, cron, etc. as you don’t need those either.

Only thing you need is something that is able to decode the IP audio stream and feed a DAC. Volumio does this using both the Music Player Daemon (MPD) and the Linux ALSA system to send the music out to an audio device.

I would take a look at FFMPEG/Mplayer and/or VLC on a minimal Linux distro.

So, look at a good board with proper LAN and than check for a well supported DAC to use on it with a basic (Linux) OS.

By no means I am saying that Volumio is not capable of giving you the stability you are looking for (I might very well live up to the expectations) but I just haven’t tried/seen it to run 24x7 for a long period. And I do know that 24x7x365 stability is possible with Linux based solutions as I have done some continues streaming for quite some time (long time ago though :wink: ).

Worked for 11 days, and then - silence
Well, will be looking for other linux based solutions, or maybe comeup with my own