AzuraCast in 2023: A Year in Review

Hello everyone! I'm Buster Neece, the creator and lead developer for the AzuraCast web radio management suite.

First of all, a huge thank-you to everyone who supports AzuraCast on any platform, whether it's here or elsewhere. I depend on your support to survive, so your support makes a significant and direct impact on my quality of life.

2023 was an immensely productive year for AzuraCast. Here are just a few of  the things we got done, alongside countless little tweaks, bug fixes and other improvements:

• This summer, we paid off a ton of tech debt by upgrading our frontend from Bootstrap 4 to 5 and from jQuery  and Vue 2 to Vue 3 with TypeScript. We also made large sections of the app "single-page app" experiences, so that things like media playback would continue as you navigate around.
• We made having a  well-mastered broadcast easier than ever with support for the open-source master_me library being built into every AzuraCast installation. We also added first-class in-app support for the popular  StereoTool library.
• Under the hood, we added support for Podman (a Docker alternative), an automatic web-based updater, a new  high-performance way of receiving Now Playing updates (via Centrifugo),  and more.
• We updated our software to support the latest versions of Liquidsoap and Icecast-KH for better stability and new features for  power users.
• We improved upon our already strong security by fixing vulnerabilities reported to us throughout the year. We also added passkey-based login for secure one-step login for users.

Looking forward, we have a ton of great feature ideas that have been submitted to us via https://features.azuracast.com/ and many of them are on our big to-do list. How fast I'm able to get  around to those things depends heavily on my physical and mental health, so I don't want to give any estimates on things, but I can confidently  say that AzuraCast continues to be a huge priority of mine and to occupy a great deal of my time and energy, and I have every intention of  continuing to maintain it into 2024 and beyond.

Regardless of  your plans this holiday and new year season, I wish you good health and  happy times, whatever form that may come in for you. While I know my  role in most people's lives is quite small, I know how much joy there is  in the music and community that internet radio can bring, and I hope my  work has made your life just a little brighter this year.