What is Shiloh Broadcaster?

The problem it solves

Getting audio from multiple sources into a central mix — and back out to headphones, speakers, and remote listeners — normally means a hardware digital audio network (Dante, AVB) or a proprietary cloud bridge. Both have real costs: hardware locks you to a vendor, cloud bridges add 200–2000 ms of latency and a monthly bill.

Shiloh Broadcaster does this with commodity Linux hardware and open protocols:

  • Audio senders push PCM over UDP using a lightweight custom protocol.
  • A Rust mixer running as a JACK client assembles the mix on the server.
  • Listeners receive the mix via another UDP protocol or via WebRTC in a browser.

End-to-end glass-to-glass latency is 10-30 ms on a wired LAN, and under 500 ms to a browser over WebRTC.

Key capabilities

Multi-sender ingest — Up to the configured slot_count, any number of shiloh-broadcaster clients can push stereo or mono channels into the mixer simultaneously. Each sender registers by name and is mapped to a contiguous slot range.

Three output buses — The mixer maintains separate Main, Monitor, and Cue program buses. Each bus has an independent gain, mute, and relay toggle. Relay clients (headphone boxes, browser sessions) are each assigned to exactly one feed.

Browser listening via WebRTC — shiloh-web-relay subscribes as three UDP relay clients (one per feed), encodes each to Opus, and serves a WHEP endpoint. Any modern browser can tune in; latency is typically 200–400 ms.

MIDI control — A USB MIDI keyboard on any machine running shiloh-midi-sender sends raw MIDI over UDP to the mixer, where a modal state machine translates note-ons to fader/mute commands and Ardour OSC transport actions.

Web UI — mixer_web (Elixir/Phoenix LiveView) polls the mixer’s state files and exposes a browser-based mixing console with per-channel VU meters, fader strips, scene snapshots, and a session panel showing all connected relay clients.

Who it’s for

  • Live sound engineers running a small event with a laptop-based FOH rig and a Pi in the monitor world for in-ear mixes.
  • Home studio engineers routing audio between rooms without pulling cables.
  • Remote broadcast operators sending a studio feed from a laptop over WireGuard to a central mix server.
  • Pi-based relay setups where a Raspberry Pi in headphone-monitoring position runs shiloh-relay and plays audio via ALSA.

License and status

Shiloh Broadcaster is open-source software developed and maintained by Shiloh BV. It is actively used in production for live event audio at the time of writing (2026).

The protocol is stable at v2. The TOML config format may gain new optional fields in minor releases; breaking changes will bump the major version.