Personal internet radio: Agentic AI DJ

Subwave launches a personal internet radio station powered by an agentic AI DJ that selects tracks, writes and speaks intros, station idents, time checks, and weather updates. The service streams a single shared broadcast via Icecast, allowing listeners to request songs in plain language while hearing the same content simultaneously. It supports custom music libraries, multiple TTS engines, and swappable LLM providers, aiming to recreate the communal radio experience with AI-driven curation.

A personal internet radio station. One Icecast stream, one broadcast. Every listener hears the same thing at the same time. An AI DJ picks the tracks and talks between them: station idents, time checks, the weather, a quick intro for whatever's going out next. You can ask for music in plain language; the DJ works out what you meant and slots it in. It's radio , not a playlist. No per-listener shuffle, no skip button, no "up next for you." You tune in and hear whatever is on. SUBWAVE.Showreel.1080p.mp4 Project site — getsubwave.com https://www.getsubwave.com/ Demo player — getsubwave.com/listen https://www.getsubwave.com/listen Mobile apps — native players — iOS on the App Store https://apps.apple.com/app/sub-wave/id6778786696 , Android on Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.getsubwave.app Setup walkthrough — getsubwave.com/setup https://www.getsubwave.com/setup Operator manual — getsubwave.com/manual https://www.getsubwave.com/manual Community — join the Discord https://discord.gg/vjVbVKnMBa The listener player. One shared broadcast, with in-app song requests. The admin console. Where the operator runs the station. The Library Observatory. A data-art map of every track the DJ has tagged, placed by genre and lit by energy. Click a point for its full dossier: BPM, key, mood, embeddings, and nearest neighbours. Open it at /observatory . One shared Icecast stream. Every listener hears the same broadcast at the same time. AI DJ that picks and talks. Curates tracks, writes intros, and reads station idents, the time, and the weather. Plain-language requests. "Play something more upbeat" or "anything by Radiohead" works. Your own music library. Pulls from Navidrome over the Subsonic API. No external catalogue. Swappable LLM provider. Ollama, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway, or any OpenAI-compatible server. Change it from the admin UI with no redeploy. Five TTS engines. Piper and Kokoro in-process for fast local speech, plus an optional tts-heavy sidecar docker compose --profile tts-heavy up -d that adds Chatterbox zero-shot voice cloning and PocketTTS 6× real-time, EN/FR/DE/IT/ES/PT . Cloud OpenAI / ElevenLabs is also available. Pick a different engine per kind of speech. Multiple DJ personas. Up to 10 souls in rotation, each with its own voice and writing style. Dual-codec broadcast. MP3 128 kbps for Sonos, hardware radios, and cars; Ogg-Opus 96 kbps for modern browsers. The web player picks automatically. Native apps and PWA. Native iOS on the App Store and Android on Google Play players — background audio, lock-screen / CarPlay / Android Auto controls, multi-station — plus an installable PWA on phone and desktop. Scheduled shows. A 24×7 grid; each slot has its own persona, mood, and skills. Pluggable skills. The DJ's between-track segments — weather, news, traffic, and your own — are skills. The built-ins are scaffolded as editable files under state/skills/<kind / on first boot, so you can rewrite a brief or change the news feed BBC → your own RSS right from the admin console — no code, no redeploy. Add your own by dropping a SKILL.md plus optional data-fetching code into state/skills/ , hitting Rescan, and enabling it. See. docs/custom-skills.md Mood-aware rotation. Time of day, weather, and festival days bias what gets played and how the DJ talks. Hourly archives. Every hour saved as MP3 for later replay. Crossfade + voice ducking. Tracks blend smoothly; the music ducks under DJ speech and lifts back up. Admin console. Live status, queue, booth log, personas, shows, skills, stats, and a debug view of recent LLM calls. Library Observatory. A full-screen, data-art map of every tagged track at /observatory — placed by genre, lit by energy, with a full dossier per track BPM, key, mood, embedding fingerprints, and nearest-in-vector-space neighbours . Scales from a few hundred to tens of thousands of tracks. MCP server. External agents Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc. can request songs and drive the DJ. Self-hosted. One docker compose up -d on a single Linux host. Optional Cloudflare in front for TLS. A playlist is a list you control. Radio is a broadcast you join. SUB/WAVE is the second kind: One shared stream. A single Icecast mount everyone connects to. Everyone hears the same audio at the same instant. That's what makes it a station instead of a jukebox. No skip. Track-end is the only natural transition. The DJ — human-curated personas plus an LLM — owns the pacing, not the listener. Operators can skip via the admin API; listeners cannot. AI as the DJ, not the catalogue. The music is your own library, served by Navidrome over the Subsonic API. The LLM picks what's next and talks between tracks. It doesn't generate music and it doesn't replace your taste. Self-hosted and swappable. Runs on one Linux box behind Cloudflare. The LLM provider is swappable at runtime Ollama, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway with no redeploy. curl -fsSL https://cli.getsubwave.com | sh installs, then offers to init + start subwave setup connect Navidrome + LLM Two Enter prompts during the installer Run subwave init now? , then Bring the stack up now? and the stack is on-air. subwave setup connects Navidrome and your LLM, or do the same in the browser at http://localhost:7700/onboarding . No clone, no Node on the host. subwave status / logs / doctor / update work from anywhere afterwards. If you'd rather skip our binary on your host and stick to docker compose : mkdir subwave && cd subwave curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perminder-klair/subwave/main/docker-compose.yml curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perminder-klair/subwave/main/.env.example mv .env.example .env Edit .env: set ADMIN USER, ADMIN PASS, SITE URL three vars, that's it . docker compose up -d Then open https://your-host/onboarding. The web wizard collects Navidrome, LLM, TTS, DJ persona, and offers to render jingles. Functionally identical: same images, same state layout, same persistence. The CLI just saves you the curl-and-edit dance and gives you subwave logs , subwave doctor , etc. for the rest of the lifecycle. Chatterbox zero-shot voice cloning and PocketTTS fast multilingual live in a separate subwave-tts-heavy sidecar that adds ~5–6 GB of PyTorch and is not started by default. To enable: docker compose --profile tts-heavy up -d The controller is wired up to discover the sidecar automatically. Stop it again with docker compose --profile tts-heavy stop tts-heavy ; the rest of the stack keeps running and Chatterbox/PocketTTS personas silently fall back to Piper. The old docker build --build-arg WITH CHATTERBOX=1 path still works if you already have a custom-built controller image — see docker/Dockerfile.controller . git clone https://github.com/perminder-klair/subwave.git && cd subwave ./scripts/setup.sh scaffolds a 3-var root .env + state/ docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up -d Broadcast icecast2 + liquidsoap + Controller cd web && npm install && npm run dev web UI on :7700, separate and hot-reloading Then http://localhost:7700/onboarding to finish configuration. Dev compose bind-mounts controller/src/ , radio.liq , and sounds/ from the repo. Controller runs under tsx watch so src/ edits hot-reload inside the container; radio.liq edits just need a docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml restart broadcast . The standalone subwave CLI works inside the cloned repo too. cd subwave && subwave start dev does the right thing. The contributor convenience is npm start , which tsx -runs the CLI source directly so unreleased changes are exercised. Same commands, same flags, no npm install -g needed. The same CLI doubles as the console for running the station. Run npm start for a status-aware menu; every menu action is also a one-shot subcommand, appended after npm start -- : npm start interactive operator console status-aware menu npm start -- setup first-boot wizard: Navidrome, LLM, admin, env files npm start -- status compose env, services, now-playing, recent events npm start -- doctor full diagnostic sweep npm start -- start dev docker compose up -d dev or prod npm start -- restart broadcast plain restart radio.liq is bind-mounted in dev npm start -- restart controller rebuild + recreate source is COPY-d at build npm start -- logs controller tail one service npm start -- listen open the web player in a browser npm start -- admin open the admin console in a browser npm start -- stop docker compose down confirms first Single Linux host, Cloudflare terminating TLS, Caddy routing to four internal services. The no-CLI quickstart above quick-start-no-cli-raw-docker is the canonical path: curl two files, fill in three vars, docker compose up -d , finish setup in the browser. See for host prerequisites, Cloudflare setup, updates, and backup. DEPLOY.md On Unraid? One-click install from Community Applications search SUB/WAVE in the Apps tab — or run the full split-container stack via the Compose Manager Plus plugin. Both in . docs/unraid.md Bring your own reverse proxy. If you already run Traefik, nginx, or your own Caddy in your homelab, swap the bundled-Caddy compose for the BYO variant: docker compose -f docker-compose.byo.yml up -d That exposes the web UI on :7700 , the controller API on :7701 , and the Icecast stream on :7702 all configurable . Point your proxy at those three. docker/Caddyfile is a working reference for the route table you need to replicate. Details in DEPLOY.md /perminder-klair/subwave/blob/develop/DEPLOY.md bring-your-own-reverse-proxy . Images on GHCR. Tagged releases publish to ghcr.io/perminder-klair/subwave-{caddy,broadcast,controller,web} . All compose files pull :latest by default; pin a version with SUBWAVE VERSION=v1.2.3 in the root .env . docker-compose.yml Production deploy with bundled Caddy default docker-compose.byo.yml Production deploy for hosts with their own reverse proxy docker-compose.dev.yml Local dev broadcast + controller only; web runs separately controller/ Node.js controller, the AI DJ brain src/llm/ LLM layer AI SDK : provider registry, prompts, tools src/broadcast/ queue, session, DJ agent, scheduler, jingles src/music/ Subsonic client, pool picker, library tagging src/audio/ TTS engines: Piper, Kokoro, Chatterbox, PocketTTS, cloud src/routes/ HTTP API split by surface public, request, onboarding, settings, … liquidsoap/ radio.liq, the Liquidsoap mixing pipeline web/ Next.js 15 web UI player, landing, admin, setup docker/ Caddyfile, Dockerfiles, icecast.xml.template, supervisor entrypoint scripts/ setup, jingle generation, update, health check mcp-subwave/ MCP server that lets an agent request songs / drive the DJ cli/ Operator CLI TS, run via tsx loader, no build step bin/subwave Operator CLI entry: setup, status, doctor, lifecycle Controller code needs a rebuild, not a restart , because its source is COPY d at image build time. radio.liq is bind-mounted, so a Liquidsoap restart is enough after editing it. The LLM provider is swappable at runtime from the admin UI. Every model call goes through the Vercel AI SDK. There is no Track-end is the only natural transition; operators have an admin-only skip endpoint. /skip for listeners. Navidrome ≥0.62 is recommended. It ships several security hardening fixes internet-radio management now admin-gated, transcode-config disclosure restricted to admins, concurrent-transcode DoS limits and the OpenSubsonic sonicSimilarity extension. SUB/WAVE streams with format=raw so the transcode limits never throttle the radio, and when sonicSimilarity is enabled the picker automatically folds Navidrome's audio-based neighbours in as an extra track-selection source — no config, capability-probed, and a silent no-op when the extension is absent. Any reasonably recent Navidrome still works.- Several areas queue/playback path, radio.liq , the crossfade, voice ducking, the LLM layer have non-obvious constraints that are easy to regress. Read the relevant note inbefore touching them. CLAUDE.md production deployment, updates, backup.: DEPLOY.md running on Unraid — one-click from Community Applications, or the Compose Manager Plus stack.: docs/unraid.md the optional heavy sidecar — expressive voices and acoustic analysis, and how to turn it on.: docs/tts-heavy.md deep architecture reference and the non-obvious constraints behind each subsystem.: CLAUDE.md how to contribute.: CONTRIBUTING.md reporting security issues.: SECURITY.md the MCP server.: mcp-subwave/README.md SUB/WAVE is playback and automation software. It does not grant you any rights to the music you broadcast through it, and it ships with no licensed content. Owning a file — a purchased download, a CD you ripped, anything in your Navidrome library — covers your own private listening. It does not cover public performance . The moment SUB/WAVE streams to anyone but you, you are publicly performing copyrighted works, which in most countries requires licences for two separate rights: - the musical composition songwriting — e.g. PRS for Music UK , ASCAP / BMI / SESAC US ; - the sound recording the master — e.g. PPL UK , SoundExchange US, under the statutory webcasting licence and its DMCA §114 conditions . You are the broadcaster and you are solely responsible for clearing those rights. If you don't want to obtain licences, run the station privately see DEPLOY.md → Make the station private /perminder-klair/subwave/blob/develop/DEPLOY.md make-the-station-private-cloudflare-access , or broadcast only content you're cleared to use — music you created or own the rights to, Creative-Commons-licensed tracks, royalty-free libraries, or public-domain recordings. This is general information, not legal advice. If you run a public station, talk to a media/IP lawyer in your jurisdiction. MIT /perminder-klair/subwave/blob/develop/LICENSE .