Tunecat is a minimal internet radio server written entirely in Pure Go. It skips FFI and native codec dependencies, making deployment straightforward. A demo instance streams Classical Music Mix under a CC Public Domain Mark 1.0 license to a chaotic IRC network. Users connect via IRC with CertFP authentication, and the tool handles ICY protocol basics out of the box.

Pre-transcoding matters here. Tunecat ships with an opusify script that converts all audio files to Opus at 128 kbps before streaming. No runtime transcoding means lower resource usage. Configuration happens through command-line flags for listening address, .opus file directory, IRC server details, TLS certificates, and channels.

The project draws heavy inspiration from MeteorLight and Kirika, borrowing Opus paging code from the latter. Written under a 2-clause BSD license, it aims to be the simplest way to run an internet radio station without heavyweight infrastructure. A reverse proxy rounds out the setup.

For developers who want a lightweight, dependency-free radio streamer that integrates with IRC, Tunecat offers a practical option. No FFI, no native codecs, just a Go binary and a directory of .opus files.