Link Robins Chirp: Live Radio / Voice Chat

Karl

Chirp is live — real audio, built into the forum you already run.

Two shapes:

Live shows — go live on any discussion. Speakers take the stage, unlimited listeners tune in with one click (guests included), and the thread itself is the chat. When the show ends, the discussion stays — nothing evaporates.
Voice channels — standing rooms you designate on a discussion: always open, joining means speaking, members drop in and out all day. The pattern you know from Discord voice, on your own forum.

What ships on day one:

Scheduled shows — announce "going live Friday 8pm": followers get a notification, and the discussion carries a live countdown in each reader's own timezone.
Live threads during sessions — everyone in the room sees new replies appear in the thread instantly while the audio runs. Built in, no realtime extension required.
Recordings (add-on) — every show recorded and posted into the discussion when the room ends. Stored on your forum, never on my servers.
Host tools — speaker policies (open stage, raise-hand queue, author-only), a participants list with mute and remove, and a ping when a hand goes up.
Plus: go-live notifications for followers, sessions that survive page reloads, a reconnecting indicator, a "You're muted" nudge, and accent colors that can adopt your forum's theme.

See it:

The live bar — the show rides the top of the discussion:

Live room bar

A scheduled show counts down in each reader's own timezone:

Scheduled show countdown

A standing voice channel — always open, join and you're speaking:

Voice channel bar

How it works:

A channel is a dedicated audio server I run for you — $10/month flat, up to 50 people on stage at once, unlimited listeners, never metered. Recordings are +$5/month, unlimited. The extension itself is free and open source:

composer require linkrobins/flarum-chirp

Install it, paste one key from your dashboard, go live. No media servers, no ports, no configuration.

The extension — free, MIT-licensed, open source:

Packagist: https://packagist.org/packages/linkrobins/flarum-chirp
GitHub: linkrobins/chirp

Get a channel: https://linkrobins.com/chirp

Questions and feedback right here in the thread — I read everything.

Karl

Two same-day patches on top of this release:

v1.1.2 — admin polish: each channel-key row is now one composed field (key, connection status, remove — all inside a single input).
v1.1.3 — hardening: the stale-room cleanup that runs when you go live now leaves rooms younger than a minute alone, closing a narrow race where two broadcasts started within seconds of each other could trip over one another.

Note: v1.1.1 exists as a tag but contains no changes — skip straight to v1.1.3. composer update linkrobins/flarum-chirp gets you there.

Karl

v1.1.4 → v1.1.6 are out — three patch releases, all robustness work from two rounds of external code review. Nothing user-facing changed, and there is nothing you need to do beyond composer update linkrobins/flarum-chirp.

What actually changed, for anyone running a channel:

Recording delivery no longer ties up a web worker. The audio pull moved into a queued job, so a long show can't hold a PHP-FPM process for minutes while it downloads. If your forum runs a queue worker, deliveries now happen there; if it doesn't, behaviour is unchanged.
Recordings have a size ceiling (2 GB by default, raisable) enforced before, during, and after the transfer.
Discussion lists got cheaper. Recordings are now fetched for a whole page in one indexed query instead of scanning the archive.
Recording storage moved onto a private disk, so the backend is swappable and nothing reaches into the storage path directly. Recordings stay unreachable except through the permission-checked player.
Streaming is hardened against a file being deleted mid-request, and going live no longer holds database locks while waiting on the media server.

Karl

Chirp v1.1.8 fixes a bug in the notifications. If you have had Chirp running, you will have seen it.

Notifications were printing the placeholder instead of the person's name:

{user} went live

instead of

Alice went live

The same applied to the voice channel and scheduled room notifications. The name was always being passed correctly; the locale file just asked for it under a name Flarum reserves for its own use, so nothing filled the gap and the raw text went out.

Update:

composer update linkrobins/flarum-chirp

Nothing to configure, and nothing else changed. Notifications already delivered keep the old wording, since the text is rendered when the notification is shown; anything from here on has the name, styled the way usernames are everywhere else on your forum, with deleted accounts handled properly.

Apologies for the noise this made in the meantime. It was found while auditing every Link Robins extension for translatability, and these three lines were the only ones affected across all 21 of them.

Lunaci

Hi, I haven't switched to Flarum 2.0 yet, but since DC is banned in Turkey, I want to set it up on warthunder.tr We have our own servers, and if we use this plugin we've set up for voice chat, there will be over 100 active voice participants. Are there features like “push-to-talk” and so on?

Karl

Lunaci thank you for your interest in this service! I will be looking into a best possible way to implement push to talk.
Voice channels are limited to 50 users per channel, fyi. So you’ll be looking into having 2 voice channels to get it working on your site at minimum.
I can see about back porting this to 1.8x so you can start getting your feet wet sooner 😉

Edit: I have an idea on Push to Talk. You can email me at karl@linkrobins.com and we can see if this is a good approach for your community!

Lunaci

Karl I sent an email. Thank you.