I am not skilled at coding (though I once hacked a bit of C to make caller ID appear correct on an open source phone system due to knowing what the UK analogue signalling way); I can gather evidence/logs etc if shown what to look for.

fork of the whole lot seems drastic (presumably would use liquidsoap anyway for the actual playout) but perhaps a slimmed down user interface/db which is aimed at those normally running a mixture of pre-recorded shows with the occasional live remote, which can handle working with local time zone (the telephone exchange software I use does) with these main enhancements:

• definitely fades a show on the hour
• can play jingles/ads at exact times overriding all other content if selected
• generates report log on everything that played and also what went wrong (if anything) that is easy to find

I do like the airtime userinterface but have concerns it uses a lot of server resources especially when the same server is dealing with transcoding real time audio.

Having looked more closely at the team behind these (and other) project I feel they are spread too thin and out of necessity their resources are focused on the newsroom and book stuff (as that is slightly easier to monetise than radio); but with both news (of any media) and books the content is split into shorter pieces.

airtime (and many other playout programs) seem aimed at student stations and community stations in countries lucky enough to have funding for these or an idealised version of such, with and a lot of tech aware staff who haven't been forced into necessity of other daytime employment. It works well for these as if the program output goes silent there is often someone who can fix it, even at random hours.

Maybe a "lite" version aimed at longer shows/content ads that can also could co-exist with another instance of airtime on a separate PC (for those with studios) is a good idea? That way any enhancements can be fed back to liquidsoap (part of the same project? I noticed it on the bugtracker) and if you do have a studio and mixer its good practice to have backup playout anyway..

Alex - thats pretty much the same as the show table in Airtime - except its in a database not a file. Airtime keeps calculating different track length times for the same track. A few seconds here or there. Why?. I am getting more and more convinced that his is where one of the problems lie.

Yes I had thought that. But why, if you add the same file to 3 different shows with different jingles, in sucession, does one get different times and the last few seconds of the podcast chopped off?
I think its rounding errors

If 3rd parties upload into the watched folders.. e.g. DJs or an automatic import, the system has no idea that it has happened - or does it?

John Chewter said:

If 3rd parties upload into the watched folders.. e.g. DJs or an automatic import, the system has no idea that it has happened - or does it?

On the 2.5.1 version I had there was one show I would often wget from the command line into a local directory called ~/ingest and I had that watched.

The user interface would show "file import in progress" and then it would appear in the library. I was not even aware manual update (or maybe that was being triggered by other shows being uploaded via the Web Interface (which I do more often now both my home and work have VDSL broadband)

I also hadn't looked at the timings in milliseconds or noticed these changed, It may simply be that something has been coded to be "too clever" in using these when accuracy of a second is all that is needed for radio broadcasting, with playout synchronised to the main transmission centre clock, this being the civil time of wherever that may be (which may or may not have daylight saving time), and that when the next event comes up on scheduling, anything else there is immediately faded out.

Some good news. Some of the above issues have aready been fixed and are in the forthcoming 2.5.2

Now that's what I am talking about.

The fixes  are suggested for 2.5.2 as you indicated.

I had no intent but to recognised that there are issues,maybe not specific to me,but to others.and if I said it in a way that may look mean,then let me clarify ,that was not my intention.

I even realised that the original post was amended.

I still maintain,Open source are the greatest thing since competition was declare the way forward.

The Restrictions place on proprietary software  of "Take it or leave it" does not apply to Opensource, on the contrary its more "Take it and break it"

Therefore to advocate use of any standalone with another software ,is not clever in a forum like Airtime.

No matter what I used,I do not advocate others to use anything else but to integrate Airtime with it .

I have people testing Airtime with other playouts,like Amarok, MiXXX and ICDJ on linux,.

In Windows the Variety is extensive too many to mention here.

Just to put a long story Short.

My mouth is not my own. I eat too much jalapeno when people seem to "diss" Airtime ,which is a software I think is  very outstanding.

So as I look at the many persons now using Airtime found here http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/airtime/whosusing/, I feel proud to contribute in my little way

Good Luck

Voisses

Ps. Do not take me too serious.





 

so is it possible to get 2.5.2 as release candidate and if so how? With the Asterisk telephone exchange, this has to be done quite often for us Europeans who connect it to analogue telephone lines as the bulk of their devs are based in USA and are now aware that tech standards for analogue lines (often delivering important signals like Caller ID or that the distant caller has cleared) vary across countries and even within them (as the PTT is privatised everywhere).

To be fair Voisses schema is a useful one, but does still require a fair bit of tech knowledge as well as a station having the staff/volunteeers to fill all that content. Today most EU community stations and many small commercial stations are struggling to exist as it is. Bear in mind that the big broadcasters constantly lobby the Communications Ministry to force the same rules and conditions on smaller stations or its "unfair competition", in any case if a station transmits a signal to the airwaves as well as online streaming sending an identifier at least every 15-30 minutes is an international legal requirment.

Airtime is good when it works. So is Liquidsoap, which is heavily integrated with it. (A parallel in telecoms is Asterisk and FreePBX).

Online broadcasting is simply a "long one way phone call" with higher audio quality, and therefore should be equally robust. An older version was used by an officer of the British Communications Ministry, Ofcom, in a test of small scale local DAB broadcasting; however he wasn't allowed to advertise his "radio station" other than as an experiment or the big stations could accuse him of corruption; and could not officially endorse the use of the software, in any case more than one audio source was sent from different places including test tones, birdsong etc.

These folk were the same ones who would try and close me and my friends down if we were running pirates. nowadays they actively encourage us to work with community stations and even to monitor analogue transmission on radio scanner and shortwave, something that you once could get nicked for, as they themselves fear important tech knowledge in broadcasting is being lost as well as a decline in quality of the content; alas, this is also because anyone with such tech knowledge can earn a full time salary twice that of a junior broadcast engineer simply working in IT & telecoms infrastructure support and development for a medium size business. Even the young people don't always have time to volunteer for live broadcasting, but can often record a mix at the weekend for later broadcast. Many of the EDM (dance music) stations have switched from "live DJ" format to pre-recorded shows, and it is people like us (older tech engineers aged 30/40 and above) who keep the online stations and community stations running as a hobby; but we have other more important things to do during day jobs and can't stay awake all night to monitor playout. Thus any "radio automation" should work well.