Furry Pirate Radio internals
Since I got a question about how the radio station works, figure I'll answer as a blog post
The station runs on a short queue, and when the queue gets short, it basically pre-generates a monologue and chooses songs to refill the queue for the next ~1h.
Text generation for the hosts is done with a local LLM, Gemma-4-26B-A4B, that runs on my gaming desktop. I use a quantized version (basically compressed) that uses like 17GB of memory. I keep it running in VRAM until I need to use it for something else.
The TTS has changed over time. When I started it in like 2021 or so it was xVASynth, then I changed to using Kokoro-TTS to generate the speech and RVC to make it sound like the right voice. Right now though it's a mix of Qwen3-TTS and VibeVoice -- not local, I run Docker containers on cloud, but runs infrequently enough that it ends up costing something like $3 a month.
For choosing the next song I calculating embeddings using Microsoft's CLAP (forget which model exactly). That runs one time when adding new songs then I can reuse the embeddings to walk from song to song.
A Python script puts all those together to choose (or generate) the next audio file.
LiquidSoap streams it to icecast which the site connects to. this is all done on a $5 or $10 VPS that I host other stuff on too. I used to use ezstream but replaced it with liquidsoap to try and fix some issues with lag transitioning between songs.
I cache a lot of stuff so things won't immediately go down if my desktop is offline. Generated text is cached and reused. The generated audio from that text gets cached and re-spliced into the stream later.
IMO most of the issues people tend to have with AI aren't issues with local/open source AI. They're more issues with the big API providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. or issues with capitalism in general. Of course there's the arguments about intellectual property violations. I could refute those one at a time, but I mean... I run a pirate radio station. Playing music. Obviously my opinion on IP law is that IP needs to be abolished.
also, anyone who's curious about ethical usage of AI can check out the AWAY Code of Ethics and maybe join their Discord server for more discussion. AWAY is a leftist community trying to bridge the gap between AI users and manual artists. It's not exclusively leftist -- anyone can join if they're not going to be A Problem -- but everyone there that I've spoken to is pretty far-left.