Hi everyone,

Airtime 1.9 RC2 is out. Our amazing dev team tell me this is now production ready. There are no known bugs in this release and we'd love you to test it fully.

To test an online demo, visit http://airtime-dev.sourcefabric.org/login (username: admin | password: admin)

What's really important is that the install/upgrade process is tested. If you're feeling brave, head over to the wiki and follow the guides there in order to manually install or to test the upgrade process.

Thanks to everyone who tested and gave us feedback on previous versions. Hopefully you'll be pleased with the improvements that have gone into this almost, almost final version!

For any feedback or issues, please make a post in this forum, or over at our bug tracker (just select Create Issue in the top right and then Airtime).

What's new?

New file storage system and human-readable file structure. The directory structure and file names on disk are now human-readable. This means you can easily find files using your file browser on your server.

Magic file synchronization. Edits to your files are automatically noticed by Airtime. If you edit any files on disk, such as trimming the length of a track, Airtime will automatically notice this and adjust the playlist lengths and shows for that audio file.

Auto-import and multiple-directory support. You can set any number of directories to be watched by Airtime. Any new files you add to watched directories will be automatically imported into Airtime, and any deleted files will be automatically removed. The "airtime-import" command line tool can now set watched directories and change the storage directory.

Graceful recovery from reboot. If the playout engine starts up and detects that a show should be playing at the current time, it will skip to the right point in the track and start playing. Previously, Airtime would not play anything until the next show started. This also fixes a problem where the metadata on the stream was lost when a file had cue-in/out values set. Thanks to the Liquidsoap developers for implementing the ability to do all of this!

Output to Shoutcast. Now both Shoutcast and Icecast are supported.

A new "Program Manager" role. A program manager can create shows but can't change the preferences or modify users.

No more rebooting after install! Airtime now uses standard SystemV initd scripts instead of non-standard daemontools. This also makes for a much faster install.

Frontend widgets are much easier to use. Their theme can now also be modified with CSS.

Improved installation Only one command to install on Ubuntu!

Improvements

Cumulative time shown on playlists. The Playlist Builder now shows the total time since the beginning of the playlist for each song.

"End Time" instead of "Duration". In the Add/Edit Show dialog, we replaced the "Duration" field with "End Time". Users reported that this was a much more intuitive way to schedule the show. Duration is still shown as a read-only field.

Feedback & promotion system. Airtime now includes a way to send feedback and promote your site on the Sourcefabric web page. This will greatly enhance our ability to understand who is using the software, which in turn will allow us to make appropriate features and receive grant funding.

Other nice things

- The show recorder can now instantly cancel a show thanks to the use of RabbitMQ.
- Only admins have the ability to delete files now.
- The playout engine now runs with a higher priority. This should help prevent any problems with audio skipping.
- Airtime has been contained. It is now easier to run other apps on the same system with Airtime because it no longer messes with the system-wide Python or PHP configurations. The python libraries needed for Airtime are now contained in a local Python virtualenv, and the PHP config variables are set in the Apache virtualhost and .htaccess files.

Bug fixes

- Fixed bug where you couldn't import a file with a name longer than 255 characters.
- Fixed bug where searching an audio archive of 15K+ files was slow.
- Fixed bug where upgrading from more than one version back(e.g. 1.8.0 -> 1.9.0) did not work.
- Fixed bug where the wrong file length was reported for very large CBR mp3 files (thanks to mutagen developers for the patch!)