Croaker

A shoutcast audio player designed for serving D&D session music.

What? Why?

Because I run an online D&D game, which includes a background music stream for my players. The stream used to be served by liquidsoap and controlled by a bunch of bash scripts I cobbled together which are functional but brittle, and liquidsoap is a nightmare for the small use case. Also, this currently requires me to have a terminal window open to my media server to control liquidsoap directly, and I'd rather integrate the music controls directly with the rest of my DM tools, all of which run on my laptop.

Now that is a powerful yak! -- Aesop Rock (misquoted)

Quick Start (Server)

This assumes you have a functioning icecast2 installation already.

% sudo apt install libshout3-dev
% mkdir -p ~/.dnd/croaker
% croaker setup > ~/.dnd/croaker/defaults
% vi ~/.dnd/croaker/defaults  # adjust to taste
% croaker add session_start /music/session_start.mp3
% croaker add battle /music/battle/*.mp3

Now start the server, which will begin streaming the session_start playlist:

% croaker start
INFO Daemonizing controller on (localhost, 8003); pidfile and logs in ~/.dnd/croaker

Connnect to the command & control server:

% telnet localhost 8003
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to croaker.local.
Escape character is '^]'.
HELP
PLAY $PLAYLIST_NAME  - Switch to the specified playlist.
FFWD                 - Skip to the next track in the playlist.
HELP                 - Display command help.
KTHX                 - Close the current connection.
STOP                 - Stop Croaker.
OK

Switch to battle music -- roll initiative!

PLAY battle
OK

Skip this track and move on to the next:

FFWD
OK

Stop the server:

STOP
Shutting down.
Connection closed by foreign host.