This project is funded through NGI Zero Core, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more at the NLnet project page.

Usage:

This tool is built for livestreaming audio to the world wide web, broadcasting a audio stream from an instance of tau-radio, the accompanying software.

Modelled after the Icecast software, it serves a html audio stream that can be used in a audio tag on any other website.

You should run this on a remote server, such as a AWS, Digital Ocean or any VPS with the correct priviledges.

• Note that the smallest available Digital Ocean 'Droplet' does not have enough RAM to build this project locally. The workaround is to build for that architecture using ex: cargo build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.

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To install:

$ cargo install --git https://github.com/tau-org/tau-tower

The first time using the tool, it will search your system for a config file. It looks for it in the path

$HOME/.config/tau/tower.toml # on macOS

or

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tau/tower.toml # on Linux

If there is no config file located there, you will be prompted to create one.

# username and password are NOT secure, they only
# link a tauradio and tautower service together
username = "username" 
password = "emanresu" 

# Sets the listening port, to which the source stream is transmitted
listen_port = 8000      

# Sets the broadcast port, from which the stream will be accessable
broadcast-port = 8001       

# Sets the server http endpoint - http://localhost:8001/tau.ogg
broadcast-endpoint = "tau.ogg"       

# Optional: 
# Sets which other sites are able to rebroadcast the stream
# "*" allowes all, adding "http://localhost:4000" to list is redundant
cors_allow_list = ["*", "http://localhost:4000"]

If you want to temporarily overwrite the config, you are able to pass arguments.

# Ex: Uses temporary credentials, and disables the local recording. 
$ tau-tower \
  --listen-port <listen-port> \
  --broadcast-port <broadcast-port> \
  --cors-allow-list "*"

Dependencies

On Linux (using apt):

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install build-essential

Streaming Pipeline

tau-radio runs on your local machine, and captures sound from the audio device on your system. The defaults are BlackHole 2ch on macOS, and pipewire on Linux, though these can be overwritten by the config or in the CLI arguments.

The captured audio is then streamed to the tau-tower, which should run on a remote server. This server application exposes a audio media stream that can be consumed by many clients, as a web radio.

Alongside tau-tower should run an instance of Asciinema which can use the live audio stream as background to a live terminal stream, by setting the broadcast endpoint URL as a media source in the streams settings.

https://example.com:8002/tau.ogg

For this to work, the Asciinema origin must be added to cors_allow_list in tower.toml:

cors_allow_list = ["https://example.com:4000"]

your computer		remote server
(audio capture)	(opt. tls/ssl)	(proxy)	(broadcaster)	(opt. stream host)
tau-radio ->	internet ->	Caddy ->	tau-tower ->	Asciinema

For TLS termination and reverse proxy setup, see Proxy Setup (Caddy).