WNYU Archives
WNYU Archives / Chives (2005-2010) was an automated stream archiving system I built for WNYU, NYU’s student-run radio station, where I was also Technical Director. I maintained it until 2010.
The WNYU 89.1 logo, 2006. Logo by WNYU.
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.
By February 2007 the archives page on wnyu.org listed every show by day, each with an inline player and a stream link, plus a podcast feed for the whole archive. That week’s list has Beats in Space on Tuesday, Crucial Chaos and my own Politricks on Thursday, and more than 50 other shows in the dropdown.
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, and it ran for years.
Why it mattered
This was 2005-2006. Podcasting was brand new — Apple had added podcasts to iTunes 4.9 on June 28, 2005. WNYU only broadcast on 89.1 FM from 4pm to 1am on weekdays, per the station’s own site, so the archive let DJs and listeners catch any show they missed.
The archive page was still listing recent recordings long after I left. Wayback captures from May 2016 and May 2018 list shows from the days just before each capture. I can’t tell from those snapshots whether it ran without gaps in between, or on the same code.
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