Origin

15 years on the Rivendell-dev list, mostly as a lurker and casual contributor. Around 2019, I ported Rivendell 3.2.0 to a DigitalOcean cloud VPS running CentOS 7 (likely the first of its kind at the time). In 2022/23, I luanched two commercial stations in Vegas: one that lived on an Ubuntu 22.04 DigitalOcean Droplet and fed the transmitter via an MP3 stream (with RDS data over UDP) to StereoTool, and a second station that lived 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 give it a name inspired by the solid foundation that Fred has built: Rivolution: the Evolution of Rivendell. I'm intentionally starting with version 6 instead of 1. If you'll indulge me for a moment, I'll explain why. Rivendell 4.4.1 is already a mature product, and Fred has already created a v5 branch, which I assume is for Qt6 migration. I wanted to honor and build on top of that legacy rather than pretend it doesn't exist.

Shipped

• Qt6 — full modernization of the codebase
• back-timing — segue back-timing, so segues no longer collide with cold intros
• rdimport — MP3 passthrough import, skipping lossy re-encoding, with waveform generation and normalization extended to Dropboxes as well
• ubuntu-26.04 — native build support

Roadmap

• A new Go-based web dashboard, replacing RDAdmin
• Visual, drag-n-drop patching between any source and any destination, with explicit persistent-vs-temporary state
• PipeWire as the native audio substrate — 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
• Front-end configuration for Icecast, Liquidsoap, and other streaming tools
• A unified installer

What's needed

Current dev environment is an x86_64 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.

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.