Liquidsoap: A high-level programming language for multimedia streaming

Abstract

Generating multimedia streams, such as in a netradio, is a task which is complex and difficult to adapt to every users' needs. We introduce a novel approach in order to achieve it, based on a dedicated high-level functional programming language, called Liquidsoap, for generating, manipulating and broadcasting multimedia streams. Unlike traditional approaches, which are based on configuration files or static graphical interfaces, it also allows the user to build complex and highly customized systems. This language is based on a model for streams and contains operators and constructions, which make it adapted to the generation of streams. The interpreter of the language also ensures many properties concerning the good execution of the stream generation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.