WNYU Archives / Chives (2005-2010) was an automated stream archiving system I built for WNYU, NYU’s student-run radio station.
The system recorded WNYU’s live broadcasts, tagged them with ID3 metadata, and made them available as downloadable MP3s — with podcast RSS feeds, years before podcasting went mainstream.
How it worked
Chives was a Python daemon that:
- Queried the WNYU schedule database to know what show was currently on air
- Captured the MP3 stream for the duration of each show
- ID3-tagged the files with show name, date, and station info
- Uploaded completed recordings to the WNYU server via SFTP
- Called a PHP API to register each new archive in the website’s database
The whole thing ran 24/7 on an Ubuntu server, automatically archiving every show on the schedule.
The code
### CHIVES2
'''
WNYU stream archiver v0.8
by Jamie Wilkinson <jamie@wnyu.org>
based on the Air America archiver
by Ted Kelleher <http://bigelow-springs.net>
'''
It was built on top of wget for stream capture, eyeD3 for ID3 tagging, MySQL for schedule data, and lftp for uploads. Simple, robust, and it ran for years.
Why it mattered
This was 2005-2006. Podcasting was brand new — Apple had just added podcast support to iTunes in June 2005. WNYU was one of the first college radio stations to offer on-demand archives of every broadcast with proper podcast feeds.
DJs and listeners could go back and listen to any show they missed. The archive became a valuable resource for the station’s music discovery community.
The website
I also helped design the WNYU website during this era.
See also
- Politricks — my radio show on WNYU
Links
- WNYU — still broadcasting from NYU