Deploy and Host SUB/WAVE on Railway

SUB/WAVE is a personal internet radio station with an AI DJ. There is one Icecast stream and every listener hears the same thing at the same time. The DJ picks tracks from your own music library, talks between them (station idents, time checks, weather, intros), and takes song requests in plain language. It is radio, not a playlist: no skip button, no per-listener shuffle.

About Hosting SUB/WAVE

Two services, each with its own volume, talking over Railway's private network:

SUBWAVE runs the official all-in-one image: Icecast, Liquidsoap, the DJ controller, the Next.js player and admin, and Caddy in front, on one domain. Settings, the library database, jingles and archives live on the volume at /var/sub-wave.
Navidrome is the music library the DJ plays from, with a drag-and-drop upload panel (Filebrowser) on a second domain. Upload music there and Navidrome imports it within seconds.

The station is already wired to Navidrome when it boots: the Navidrome admin user and its password are generated at deploy and handed to SUBWAVE, so there are no credentials to copy. The admin password for the station is generated too.

Common Use Cases

A private or public internet radio station for your own music collection, with a DJ that talks
A background station for a shop, studio, stream or Discord community, with scheduled shows and personas
A listening room for friends, where people request songs by describing them

Dependencies for SUB/WAVE Hosting

An LLM for the DJ's picks and chatter: a key for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible server, or a reachable Ollama. Without one the music still plays and the station picks tracks on its own, but the DJ stays silent.
Your music, uploaded through the Navidrome upload panel.

Deployment Dependencies

Implementation Details

After deploying:

Upload music. Open the Navidrome service's upload-panel domain (the one on port 8080). Log in as admin with FILEBROWSER_PASSWORD from the Navidrome service's Variables tab, and drop in folders of tagged MP3/FLAC files.
Run the setup wizard. Open /onboarding?rerun=1 on the SUBWAVE domain and sign in as admin with ADMIN_PASS from the SUBWAVE service's Variables tab. Leave the Navidrome step blank, because the station is already connected to it. The other steps set your LLM provider and key, the voice, the station name and your location (for weather and the station's timezone). Saving puts your music on air within seconds.
Listen. The player is at /, the stream at /stream.mp3 (paste it into VLC, a hardware radio or Sonos), and the operator console at /admin.

Until there is music and the wizard has been saved, the stream plays the station ident on a loop. Music you add later is picked up without a restart.

Voices. Piper is the default voice and costs almost nothing. Kokoro is built in too and sounds better, but its model takes about 700 MB of RAM once it is used. Cloud voices (OpenAI, ElevenLabs) need only a key.

Memory. On Railway the station runs at about 360 MB and Navidrome with its upload panel at about 90 MB, so the Trial plan runs it with Piper. Switch to Kokoro only on a plan with at least 2 GB.

Changes from the upstream image, all in the wrapper:

Railway's PORT goes to Caddy only. The controller reads PORT for its own internal port and would otherwise fight Caddy for it.
Caddy trusts X-Forwarded-For from Railway's edge, so request cooldowns and the admin lockout see each listener's real IP instead of treating everyone as one visitor.
Navidrome listens on IPv4 and IPv6 (ND_ADDRESS=[::]) so the station can reach it on the private network.

Keep in mind:

Hourly archives are off by default. If you turn them on, they grow by about 1.4 GB a day at 128 kbps, so watch the volume size.
Admin → Settings → Backup → Export saves settings, schedule and the library database (API keys are left out). Take one before updating.
To update SUB/WAVE, bump the image tag in the wrapper's Dockerfile and redeploy.
Streaming music to the public may need a performance licence where you live. A station password (Admin → Settings) keeps it private.

Why Deploy SUB/WAVE on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying SUB/WAVE on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.