On-air cockpit
Now playing with real artist/album/title from tags, a GO / STOP master switch, skip and stop-after-song, live as-aired history, and a studio-health badge — big buttons, plain English.
On air at KDPI · FM 88.5 · since July 2026
Radio automation that never goes silent.
StudioFire is self-hosted radio automation software for Windows — a modern ZaraRadio replacement built for small FM, LPFM, and community stations. One package, your hardware, your music library. No cloud, no subscription, no internet required to stay on air.
Windows 10/11 · self-hosted, no cloud or subscription · full release notes on GitHub
72 hoursthe pass bar we test against: zero silence over 2 s (NAS pulled, player killed, corrupt files, power cycles)
4 tiersof failover before anything could go quiet
.lstZara playlists open & save in place
FreeMIT licensed, no subscription, no per-seat fee
Latest release · 7 November 2026
StudioFire 1.6.4
Royalty reports became a button, the installer now installs without a terminal, and a deleted spot rule can no longer take your legal IDs off air by accident.
Why not RadioDJ, Rivendell or Zara?
They are all free, and so is StudioFire — and we have a lot of respect for all three. Nothing below says they lack anything; it only says where StudioFire put its effort: keeping audio on air by itself, and being operable from anywhere on the studio network.
ProductWhat StudioFire does instead
RadioDJ
free Four automatic failover tiers before anything could go quiet — a bad file, a yanked NAS or a crashed player is absorbed by the next tier. Operators work from a browser on any device on the studio network, not from a remote desktop session.
free Four automatic failover tiers before anything could go quiet — a bad file, a yanked NAS or a crashed player is absorbed by the next tier. Operators work from a browser on any device on the studio network, not from a remote desktop session.
Rivendell
free The same four-tier failover in a Windows program: one
free The same four-tier failover in a Windows program: one
.exe and a browser
setup wizard, no Linux admin needed, no database tuning, and nothing to install on the
operator's machine.
ZaraRadio
free Opens your existing
free Opens your existing
.lst playlists in place, runs alongside Zara while you
switch, and adds as-aired reporting, royalty filing and a web GUI.
Commercial suites
$$$ per year No licence fee, no per-seat cost, and the source is on GitHub — but you can also pay us to install, tune and monitor it if you would rather not think about it.
$$$ per year No licence fee, no per-seat cost, and the source is on GitHub — but you can also pay us to install, tune and monitor it if you would rather not think about it.
Free here is the MIT licence, not a trial. Support is available but never required: every screen, log and report is yours to inspect.
Built for stations that can't afford silence
Every other part of the system — web GUI, scheduler, indexer — can crash, hang, or be updated. The music keeps playing.
Playlists that just work
Every playlist IS a .lst file on disk. Open your existing Zara playlists directly; every edit saves back to the same file, with paths translated automatically.
Scheduling & shows
Shows run once, daily, or weekly with run windows and a month calendar view. They take over at a song boundary and hand back to rotation cleanly.
Spots, IDs & jingles
Rotating folders for station IDs, ads, PSAs and jingles — every N minutes, set minutes past the hour, one-off, or manual. Always inserted at song boundaries; music is never cut off.
As-aired reporting
As-aired logs by date range with CSV export for sponsor affidavits and regulatory records — built from the tamper-resistant play journal the engine writes directly.
Song titles on the stream
Writes the on-air artist and title for your streaming encoder, so the website player shows what is playing — plus an optional direct push to the stream host, and a live monitor of what listeners actually see.
Royalty reporting
SoundExchange Report of Use, built from the as-aired log in one command — the report, the evidence log, and a warnings list. Sound recording performances only; no invented ISRCs or labels.
Library that pre-caches
A background indexer scans your NAS share (MP3, M4A/AAC, FLAC and WAV) without hammering the network. Songs are pre-cached to local disk before airtime, so a network hiccup can't interrupt playback.
Silence requires four separate failures
The audio engine is a tiny standalone service that never touches the database or the network. If the current source can't play, the next one is already waiting.
- 01Next cached track
Pre-cached to local disk before airtime.
- 02Emergency folder
Your curated, always-safe local tracks.
- 03Cached rotation music
More local music already on disk.
- 04Baked-in fallback asset
Ships with the installer. Something is always on air.
The engine watches itself every second and auto-restarts the player if it hangs. The stack was torture-tested — NAS yanked mid-track, player killed repeatedly, corrupt files queued, power cycles — with a pass bar of zero silence longer than two seconds over 72 hours.
This is the actual product
Every screen below is a real capture from StudioFire running a live station playlist — no mockups. It is a web GUI, so the same screens work on the studio PC, a tablet at the desk, or a phone down the hall.
Coming from ZaraRadio?
Your playlists just work. Open them directly, keep editing the same files, and run Zara and StudioFire side by side on the same playlists during your transition. Operators get a web GUI from any device on the studio LAN — the on-air PC just runs the services.
Get StudioFire
Latest release
Download for Windows
StudioFire v1.6.4
Windows 10/11 installer · bundles embedded Python, mpv & NSSM — nothing to pre-install, no terminal, no JSON. Upgrades keep your config, playlists and data.
- New installs: run the setup .exe — one UAC prompt, then the station name, music folder and audio device are asked for in a browser wizard. The wizard never asks you to open a terminal or edit a file.
- Want it installed and monitored? We do that — see Services, or email contact@veteranop.com.
- Existing stations: updates are built in — Settings → Software updates pulls the newest release from GitHub and restarts the services for you.
- Requirements: a Windows 10/11 PC wired to your audio chain, and music on a local disk or NAS share.
- Verify: every release ships the installer together with a
SHA256SUMS.txt— the install helper checks it before running anything. - SmartScreen note: the installer isn't code-signed yet, so Windows may show “Windows protected your PC”. Click More info → Run anyway — it's built from the public repo.
Telemetry, precisely: nothing on the playout path ever sends data — the audio engine and scheduler have no network code that reports anything. The web page loads GA4 for feature-usage counting, and it includes your station name; it is on by default and turned off with one line in config\config.json. We are moving it to opt-in, and until we do we would rather say this plainly than bury it.
From the team that built it
The software is free. The engineering is where we work.
StudioFire is built by VeteranOp, a veteran-owned engineering shop that runs a working FM station's studios, network and backups. We are radio engineers who write software, not a software company that read about radio — RF planning, STL links, EAS, studio-to-transmitter chains, and the machines that keep them on air.
Install & migration
We install it, point it at your library, move your Zara playlists and spot rules across, and sit with your operators until they are comfortable. You keep the old system running until you say stop.
from $1,500
Get a quote →
Support plans
A named human, a phone number, and monitoring that tells you about a problem before the audience does. Business-hours or on-call, priced monthly so it is predictable. Covers the StudioFire software and the on-air PC — RF, tower, network and security monitoring are separate engineering plans.
from $150/month
Get a quote →
Studio box
A prepared on-air PC: Windows and StudioFire installed, services tested, audio chain verified, spare key in the rack, and a commissioning report you can hand to a board.
Get a quote →Hosted streaming
We handle the stream host, the mount, the player on your website and the metadata that feeds it — including the listener figures your royalty report needs.
from $59/month
Get a quote →
Compliance reporting
As-aired affidavits for underwriters, legal-ID evidence hour by hour, and the SoundExchange Report of Use checked and filed on time. We have done this for a real station, not in theory.
Get a quote →Station engineering
Studio builds, wiring, RF and STL work, EAS compliance, network segmentation and backup power — the parts of a station that software alone cannot fix.
Get a quote →From prices are entry figures for a standard single-studio scope after a short discovery — the final quote follows an assessment of your library and current setup. Not included: travel and on-site days, multi-station or translator groups, library cleanup beyond a standard migration, custom development, third-party licence fees, after-hours cutover windows and hardware. Support plans cover the StudioFire software and the on-air PC; RF, tower, network and security monitoring are separate engineering services. Hosted streaming does not include music performance licensing or copyright filings — the listener figures are for your own royalty workflow.
Every quote is written for your station's actual setup. Email contact@veteranop.com with what you run today — one FM, an LPFM, a translator, or a stream-only station — and you will get a straight answer about what it takes.
Straight answers about radio automation
Does it need an internet connection?
No. Playout, scheduling, spots, reports and the web GUI all run on your own PC and LAN. You need internet only to install it, to fetch an update, and (if you stream) to reach your stream host.
What hardware does it need?
A Windows 10 or 11 PC wired to your audio chain — most stations run it on a small desktop or a 1U box. Music can live on a local disk or on a NAS share; the indexer pre-caches songs to local disk before airtime so a network hiccup cannot stop a song.
Can I keep using ZaraRadio during the switch?
Yes, and most stations do for a week or two. StudioFire opens the same .lst playlists
in place and saves back to the same files, so you can run both against one library and change over
when you are ready.
Is it really free?
Yes — MIT licence, full source on GitHub, no trial timer, no per-seat fee, and nothing phones home to unlock features or play audio. You can pay us to install or support it, but you never have to.
Who supports it?
Community help on GitHub Issues, or VeteranOp for installs, support plans and engineering — see Services or email contact@veteranop.com.
What happens if something breaks at 3am?
The engine is a separate service that never touches the database or the network, and it has four failover tiers before anything goes quiet. If the player hangs it is restarted automatically; if the NAS disappears it plays what is already on local disk. A human gets woken up only if all of that fails.
Can I see it running?
Ask, and we will show you a live station on a screen share rather than a video. KDPI 88.5 FM in Ketchum, Idaho has been running it since July 2026.
Questions? Talk to an engineer.
StudioFire is built and supported by VeteranOp — a veteran-owned IT and RF engineering firm. We design and maintain broadcast and public-safety radio systems: studio builds, STL and translator links, EAS compliance, and the servers behind them. StudioFire exists because we needed it for a station we operate, and it is the same build we run there.
Ask us anything about the software, or about the parts around it. Email is the fastest way to reach a person who can actually answer.