Re: [Savonet-users] New to Liquidsoap - combining/adding playlists question

[Tim B. <ti...@tj...>]

I did all those things, still takes time out of a day to keep the station scheduled, and yes the Airtime people know of my issues, it's apparently a bug that will be fixed in the next version which will arrive at some point. After the 3 month delay of 2.4, I'm doubtful they will deliver it this week, or whether it will actually fix it.

Got fed up of the issues with pypo (?) and Airtime schedule playout, it's always been glitchy since 2.4 and not great, and even before then was random in it's reliability  - many airtime-playout restarts needed. Now I've switched to just having a Liquidsoap 'auto' fallback it's like night and day, whereas I was getting disconnects every 5-10 minutes, and many restarts on a static-dead feed, now they are at most every few hours and always sort themselves out. Airtime is still there, but not playing any schedules which seems to be the problem. I'd eventually like to take Airtime out of the equation completely cos I suspect the current few issues are caused by that - if they had developed an Auto DJ feature like people have been requesting for years, or even a Copy/Paste show function (yep you can see my request for that on the Dev area) I might've kept with them.

Linked shows only work if you have shows at the same time every day, and with exactly the same content. I did have repeats, but needed them to be at different times. Again, nice feature but useless to me  - who schedules EXACTLY the same show at the same time every day? Whereas time-shifting, that's quite useful for different parts of the world.

And I used the Genre tag and dynamic Smartblocks to generate show playlists. Again you still have to click that button every day, then fiddle around to make the shows fit as the 'smart' features are quite dumb, for instance it scheduling an 1 hour show to fill the last minute of a slot! Obviously those cutoffs happen now as part of the auto but at least I don't have to faff with the schedule constantly and struggle with that interface…I hate to think how much time I wasted while the Showbuilder screen was grey and processing, kind of like the Beachball of Airtime.

Basically after running Airtime station since March, and another box before that, I think that Liquidsoap is great, but Airtime is far from mature - it was getting stable at 2.3.1 but a problem forced me to upgrade Liquidsoap and then AIrtime 2.4 RC under protest, and sadly since then it's been bug city for me - corrupted schedules forcing a total database reset, glitchy audio schedule playout, Monit PID problems - you can see all my posts at Sourcefabric if you don't believe me. I was OK with the RC and betas having issues - although the corrupted database was a big annoyance having to input all my blocks, shows, settings, playlists etc again - but that the released version hasn't made things better, well that was the last straw.

Tim

On 26 Aug 2013, at 12:01, Daniel James <dan...@so...> wrote:

> Hi Tim,
> 
>> Currently trying to switch to a programmed auto-DJ solution because
>> I'm having major problems with Airtime 2.4
> 
> Have you filed tickets for those issues? We are just about to make a
> bugfix release, 2.4.1, so more bug reports would be very welcome.
> 
>> fed up of scheduling shows basically….
> 
> Have you tried the linked shows feature, or smart blocks? In
> combination you can make the schedule fully automated that way.
> 
> Associating one file with another could be achieved more easily with
> tagging, rather than specific directories (since you probably want to
> upload all files in a single action). For example, if you title tag your
> files like this:
> 
> The Slits Live in London
> The Slits (Interview)
> 
> and both files have the same datestamp, they can be found with a search
> for 'Slits' and listed in date order. Or you could use a Genre tag of
> 'Punk' for one and 'Interview' for another.
> 
> From there, you could create a static smart block to ensure that
> associated files are played together in the order that you want.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Daniel