Community and internet stations frequently run everything on one PC. That is a legitimate architecture — provided you know what you are asking of it.
The jobs on that machine
- Decoding and mixing audio across two decks, continuously.
- Driving the audio interface through WASAPI.
- Encoding and pushing a stream to Icecast or Shoutcast, if you stream.
- Writing play history to SQLite as tracks play.
- Running rotation generation and loudness analysis when asked.
- Rendering the interface, meters and any second-screen displays.
Most of these are light. The two that spike are loudness analysis and rotation generation.
Keeping the spikes away from the audio
Loudness warm-up runs a maximum of two concurrent analyses, deliberately, so filling the cache cannot starve playback. Analysis is also cached to disk keyed by path, size and modification time, so it is a one-time cost per file rather than a recurring one.
Metadata extraction runs on background workers with progressive updates. Playlist saves are debounced three seconds and written on a background thread.
The pattern throughout: heavy work happens off the interface thread, throttled, and preferably once.
Switch on On-Air Mode
On a single-PC station this is not optional in my view. It halves VU meter cadence to 10 Hz, stretches health checks to five minutes, and suspends marquee animations — returning headroom to the audio path exactly when you need it.
Streaming on the same box
The encoder taps post-mix PCM, so it costs an encode rather than a second decode. MP3 via libmp3lame is the cheapest and most compatible; AAC gives better quality per bit at some CPU cost.
Set a reconnect policy. On one machine there is nobody watching a separate encoder application, so automatic reconnection is the difference between a brief blip and an outage until someone notices.
What to watch
The system health indicator covers licence, audio output, database and AI state in one place. The What's Next panel shows encoder status alongside upcoming tracks.
Between them you can tell at a glance whether the machine is doing all of its jobs — which on a one-PC station is the only monitoring you have.