Rivolution — the Evolution of Rivendell

Q: Does Rivolution support RHEL or CentOS?

No -- RHEL-family support (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Rocky) is deliberately abandoned, with CentOS losing upstream support being the deciding factor. The existing build-system code for it is intentionally left in place rather than removed, as a starting point for anyone who wants to pick it up. Ubuntu 26.04 is the actively supported and tested target.

Q: How do I report a bug or get involved?

Open an issue or check the wiki on the Rivolution GitHub repo at github.com/anjeleno/rivolution.

Origin

15 years on the Rivendell-dev list, mostly as an observer and casual contributor. Around 2019, I ported Rivendell 3.2.0 to a DigitalOcean cloud VPS running CentOS 7 and it drew a lot of attention. In 2022/23, I put Rivendell on the air in Las Vegas at ACiD 87.7, that lived entirely in a cloud VPS and ViBE 99.7 on physical hardware, with a cloud instance as a backup.

What started out as an experiment, to see if some of the features I've always wanted in Rivendell would actually land, evolved into a full fork. The architecture has diverged significantly enough that I made the decision to separate it from upstream and gave it a name inspired by the solid foundation that Fred has built: Rivolution: the Evolution of Rivendell Radio Automation.

Back in February 2014, I posted to the Rivendell-dev list asking whether there was a way to make segue chains respect a song's cold intro instead of walking over the vocal. Twelve years later, that's exactly what Rivolution's segue back-timing fixes below. I didn't set out to solve that one post, but it's a good example of how this project actually took shape.

Shipped

Qt6 — full modernization of the codebase; no more legacy Qt5 stacks getting harder to build and support
ubuntu-26.04 LTS — native .deb packages for AMD64 and ARM64 (RHEL/CentOS/Fedora support is deliberately dropped, but the build-system code is left in place for anyone who wants to maintain it)
Web dashboard — a new Go-based dashboard (rivapi) for day-to-day orchestration: service control, streaming configs, PipeWire/JACK patches, scheduled tasks, mode switching, processing, and config backup/restore. Use the parts you want, skip the rest — no terminal required
Segue back-timing — so segues no longer collide with cold intros
rdimport — MP3 passthrough import (useful for maintaining smaller footprints of long-form programming), skipping lossy re-encoding, with waveform generation and normalization extended to Dropboxes as well
Unified systemd stack — core services actually start and stop cleanly together as one managed unit, eliminating race conditions with flaky startup scripts
Unified installer — see the wiki, or build your install script here
Broadcast tool suite — Icecast, Stereo Tool, and ffmpeg-based stream encoding, all managed directly through the dashboard instead of hand-editing native config files
Self-healing patchbay — PipeWire/JACK connections persist automatically across restarts and reboots via a continuously-running reconciler, no manual re-patching after a reboot. Manage patches natively without needing QJackCTL or Cadence.
Remote broadcast via Icecast relay — VLC's output patches persistently into Rivendell's input; pair it with a lightweight remote encoder streaming to an Icecast source and you've got a full remote-broadcast path, replacing a rack of outboard RPU/codec gear with an internet connection
Live topology switching — move a station between Standalone, Server, or Client mode directly from the dashboard, without a full reprovision
Real bug fixes — including a waveform corruption bug at maximum zoom level

Roadmap

Visual, drag-n-drop patching between any source and any destination, with explicit persistent-vs-temporary state (today's dashboard patchbay saves connections, but isn't yet a drag-n-drop graph)
PipeWire as the universal audio engine — ALSA and AudioScience HPI become PipeWire stream clients underneath it
Native AES67 support, via PipeWire
True any-to-any real-time routing — no single-driver lock-in

Right now, an ALSA-only install works just like stock Rivendell; eventually PipeWire will be mandatory to enable any-to-any routing. That's a tradeoff accepted to modernize the audio engine. For now, treat Rivolution as beta software: don't run it in a live production environment yet, and standard open-source rules apply — it comes with no warranty. Rivolution is not backward-compatible with Rivendell v4 and there's a database schema bump to 379.

What's needed

Current dev environment is an ARM64 Ubuntu 26.04 UTM guest on an M4 MacBook Air — useful, but it can't replicate what a real studio rack will tell you. What's actually needed: people with physical hardware who can test against real broadcast environments — specifically ALSA, AudioScience drivers, and AES67 once that work lands.

If you're running Rivendell on real hardware and you're curious about the Qt6 work, get in touch.

Known Issues

Pulled live from this repo's KNOWN_ISSUES.md — always current, never a stale copy. Some of these are exactly the kind of thing the hardware testers above could help verify.

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FAQ

What is Rivolution?

A modern Qt6 fork of Rivendell, the open-source radio automation system, developed in parallel with Fred Gleason's original project, targeting professional broadcast and media environments.

How is Rivolution different from Rivendell?

Full Qt6 modernization, native Ubuntu 26.04 packages, a Go-based web dashboard, segue back-timing, an integrated broadcast tool suite, and a self-healing JACK/PipeWire patchbay are already shipped — see Shipped above. PipeWire as the universal audio substrate, native AES67 support, and visual drag-n-drop patching are next — see Roadmap above.

Why version 6 instead of starting at 1?

At the time of this fork, Rivendell was at version 4.4.1int3. Rivendell 4.4.1 is already a mature product, and Fred has an existing v5 branch (assumed to be for his own Qt6 migration work) — starting the version number at 6 is meant to honor and build on that legacy rather than pretend it doesn't exist.

Is Rivolution running in production anywhere?

The developer has run multiple commercial stations on Rivendell including ViBE 99.7 in Las Vegas and ACiD877.com which just fully migrated to Rivolution v6. Active development continues on Ubuntu 26.04. Check Known Issues above before assuming any specific feature or hardware path is fully verified yet.

What license is Rivolution under?

GPLv2, the same license as upstream Rivendell.

Does Rivolution support RHEL or CentOS?

No — RHEL-family support (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Rocky) is deliberately abandoned, with CentOS losing upstream support being the deciding factor. The existing build-system code for it is intentionally left in place rather than removed, as a starting point for anyone who wants to pick it up. Ubuntu 26.04 is the actively supported and tested target.

What hardware help is most needed right now?

People with real AudioScience HPI hardware, ALSA-based broadcast gear, or AES67 environments who can test against an actual studio rack — see "What's needed" above.

How do I report a bug or get involved?

Open an issue or check the GitHub repo and its wiki.

Relationship to Rivendell

Fred's work is the foundation of everything here. None of this exists without what he built. Rivolution isn't intended to supersede or replace Rivendell, it's a parallel fork that reflects the direction this needed to take for my specific use case. The project remains fully open.

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