Time for another sneak peek. A while back we talked about multi-room audio; today it’s something we’ve wanted in Veilamp for a long time, and it’s finally taking shape: Broadcast mode. In short — you can run your own live internet radio station, right out of Veilamp.

As always, the honest caveat first: this is a roadmap post, not a release. Broadcast mode is in active development and isn’t in a build you can download yet. What’s below is where it’s going. We’ll shout from the rooftops when it’s ready to try.

Be your own radio station

Veilamp has always let you tune in to internet radio. Soon it’ll let you be one.

Anyone who’s tried to run an internet radio station knows the drill: stand up an Icecast or Shoutcast server, wrangle mount points, config files, ports, a source client, maybe a VPS to host it all. We wanted the opposite of that. The whole pitch for Broadcast mode is zero configuration:

  1. Install Veilamp.
  2. Add some songs to the queue.
  3. Go live.

That’s it. You’re on the air. There’s a station name, a queue, and a Go Live button — not a config file in sight.

Share a code, and people tune in

When you go live, Veilamp gives you a broadcast code — one string you can paste to a friend or drop in a chat (a QR code works too). Anyone who has it can tune into your station straight from Veilamp, and it shows up for them like any other live radio station, with your station name and what’s playing right now.

You decide who gets in. Keep it friends-only by only sharing the code with your friends, or make it public by posting the code anywhere. (A browsable public directory of stations is a later chapter — for now, the code is the key.) And because the code is the key, it’s also the kill switch: rotate it and every listener is cut off instantly. You’re always the one holding the plug.

No servers, no cloud, no middleman

Here’s the part that makes it Veilamp: there’s no central media server. Your audio streams peer-to-peer over the Veilid network, end-to-end encrypted, straight from you to your listeners. We’re not in the middle. There’s no company relay logging who tuned in, no account, no cloud bill. It’s the same private, friends-first networking that powers sharing your library — we just taught it to carry a live program.

Because it’s pull-based (listeners stay a few seconds behind live for a smooth, jitter-proof stream), your machine doesn’t melt trying to fan out to everyone individually. It just publishes the show, and listeners grab it.

A crowd makes it stronger

This is the part we’re most excited to build toward. Normally, the more people who tune into a station, the harder the source has to work — every new listener is another mouth to feed, and a popular show can buckle under its own success. We’re flipping that.

Every segment of a broadcast is immutable and cryptographically signed, so a listener who already has a chunk of the show can safely pass it along to the next listener, and everyone can verify it’s the real, untampered stream. That means the audience itself becomes the infrastructure: lean on the Veilid network’s mesh and listeners relay to listeners, spreading the load across the crowd instead of piling it all on the broadcaster.

The upshot is genuinely counterintuitive — a bigger audience doesn’t mean more strain, it means a more robust stream. More people tuned in means more copies of each segment out in the mesh, which means more resilience to a flaky route or a busy broadcaster. The crowd carries the show.

This piece is further out on the roadmap than the rest, but it’s not a bolt-on afterthought: the broadcast format is already designed around immutable, signed segments precisely so the relay mesh can click into place when it’s ready.

It’s a real DJ booth, not just a playlist

A station is more than a shuffle button, so Broadcast mode comes with actual decks:

  • A live queue with crossfade, so tracks blend instead of clunking into each other.
  • Mic / talk-over — grab a microphone and talk over the music. Veilamp automatically ducks the music under your voice and brings it back up when you stop, so you sound like a real DJ without riding a fader.
  • Bumpers and station IDs — drop in your own jingles on a cadence (“you’re listening to Midnight Static…”).
  • Headphone cue — preview and line up the next track in your headphones before it goes out to listeners.
  • Now playing + station identity — set a name, genre, description, and art; listeners see the current track’s tags update live.

And you pick the quality when you go live: Lossless (FLAC) for audiophile stations, or an Opus tier (High, Medium, or Low) when you’d rather be gentle on bandwidth. Same station, your call.

Run it from your desktop — or hand it to a server

Two ways to broadcast, depending on how always-on you want to be:

  • From your desktop. The simplest mode: your app is the station. It plays from your local library and streams from your machine. Close the app and the show’s over.
  • From your always-on server. Point it at your LAN server and the station lives there instead — so it keeps playing even after you close your laptop and go to bed. Your desktop becomes a slick remote control for the station, and if you want to talk on mic, it even streams your microphone up to the server for you.

A quick, friendly note

You’re the station manager here, which means you’re the one at the controls — so broadcast what’s yours to share. We’re building the tools; what goes out over them is your call.

Where it stands

Keeping it honest, like last time:

  • The station engine — the mixer, the queue, crossfade, mic ducking, bumpers, cue, and the lossless + Opus encoders — is built, and it’s shared by both the desktop app and the server, so both can host a station over the same open format.
  • Tuning in from Veilamp as a live radio station is working.
  • Running a station from an always-on server, with the desktop as a remote (mic included), is working.
  • Still ahead: the public station directory, the listener relay mesh described above (so big audiences make a station stronger, not slower), and listen/broadcast support across more platforms (mobile tune-in is on the way; broadcasting from a phone comes later).

One more thing we care about: the whole thing is an open, documented protocol, so down the road other apps could broadcast to — or listen to — Veilamp stations. No walled garden.

No firm date yet; we’d rather get the feel of it right than rush it. But we really can’t wait to hear what you put on the air.

Until then — happy listening, and soon, happy broadcasting.