About ten years ago a dear friend and I started a community radio station. In order to make our FCC license more competitive, we started internet streaming pretty early on.

We had great community buy-in, but we needed to broadcast 24/7 and decided to record and rebroadcast live shows.

We had no money, just a MacMini. So we had to do everything with things that came with MacOS or were free or near free.

We ended up creating a pretty impressive interlinking set of AppleScripts, Automator apps, and iTunes Smart Playlists, all driven by Calendar alarms. Calendar alarms would start recordings, which would use the magic import to iTunes folder to get it into iTunes. This would then move into a smart playlist that was set to look for certain tags and only have the most recent audio file with those tags in it.

When a rebroadcast would come up, it was pretty simple. A calendar alarm would trigger an AppleScript that triggered one of these Smart Playlists.

It all worked well for a long time. Ultimately we got our FCC license, and donations allowed us to improve our IT. But this station ran on iTunes, AudioHijack, AppleScript, Automator, and Calendar alarms for years.

I still really want to understand what those apps are doing in the background to cause this in the first place.

Not a bad idea! I think of works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilliogy, which has a pretty significant focus in the second book about what a new style of collaborative governance might look like. Narrative is always the most powerful way to convince people of ideas, so I say go for it!

I have a Pi4 that is running Homebridge and pihole.