Create a virtual DJ on your Raspberry Pi

29 September 2022

I had a funny idea about using text to speech together with MP3s to create a virtual radio station. All the fun and trivia of the radio, but with complete control of the playlist and the DJ's jokes. Now that idea has been realised in my latest Raspberry Pi project, Raspberry Radio. You give the Python program an MP3 collection and a set of jingles, and it creates a personalised radio station just for you. Before each song, the program uses text to speech to tell you something about the track, such as what type of music it is or when it was released. It works by pulling information from the tags in the MP3 files. Every few songs, the program reads out the news and weather, using the Newsreader program that was published previously.

Like ArtEvolver before it, one of the things I love about this project is that it's easy for anyone to customise. As a minimum, it can be fed your favourite music. You can, though, also tailor what the DJ says and change the news source to your favourite publication. The project has been designed to work with a Display-O-Tron HAT if you have one (and can be modified to use a PiGlow for disco lights instead), but it works without any special equipment. You can even run it on a Windows PC.

I hope that the project also sparks some ideas in readers about how they can use the various technologies demonstrated, such as text to speech, MP3 tag reading, playing music in Python, and reading RSS and JSON files. There's lots to learn by studying the code.

Raspberry Radio appears in a four-page tutorial in issue 122 of The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine. The article contains the complete code and instructions, and a breakdown of how it works. You can download the PDF for free, but may choose to support the magazine with a donation or by buying a print copy. The newsreader part of the project was covered in the issue 121.

Why not download my album of electronic music, Artificial, to use with Raspberry Radio or add to your collection?

In other magazine news, issue 5 of Amtix, the Amstrad CPC magazine is also out now. I wrote a one-page retrospective on Get Dexter, and the mag is packed with news and reviews from the Amstrad scene. There's a hardback Amtix annual available for pre-order now, which I've also contributed to. I don't think I can tell you what's in it yet, but I've seen it and it is looking great!

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