Technology - now working and on the blink

After finishing university for Christmas I've been busy. 1 live and another VT show. But that's normal.

I've spent some of the past couple of days setting up a test server for AllDay DJ (I'm now operating 2). The system is streaming fine from an old Duron 1.6GHz box I've got kicking around the house. This is all complete with in-house "Donkey FM" jingles. Well, you've got to test it with realistic audio. :P

Although I now have a few test rigs, development has come to a standstill at the moment due to university commitments. Specifically, I've got a sizable solo software development project to complete by April. It eats up a fair amount of time.

On another topic - we've had some technology fail. I'm currently shacking up with family for Christmas where they have a Sky HD box. All well and good, except it's throwing up an error. Specifically moaning about a lack of HDCP (encrypted content protection) support on the TV. Odd for something that's worked fine for a number of months. I've got a funny feeling that it's the set top box on the blink. However, the usual sky box fixes don't work. Go figure...

Pronouncing Local Names On Air

Local radio is made up of a number of different local aspects - stories, views, geographical knowledge, etc. Well, at least that's what it's supposed to be and most stations do it.

However, one issue that comes up from time to time is pronouncing place names. It can make you stick out like a sore thumb if you get a name obviously wrong. However, with a lot of names there's even some disagreement between the locals.

Take the example of Crossford, a village near Dunfermline. Is it crossf-OAR-d or crossf-OR-d? I'm more likely to pronounce it OAR, but that's due to going to school in the Dunfermline area.

My personal point of view is local place names should be pronounced properly if possible (be prepared to see "flem" on pronunciation sheets in Scotland!) otherwise phonetically.

As an exercise - why not try to figure out these Scottish place names that are occasionally mispronounced on air:

Kirkcaldy

East Wemyss

Scone

Falkirk

Broughty Ferry

And the answers (from my personal knowledge, may be wrong, etc.):

Kirkcaldy - Kirk-aw-dy

East Wemyss - East Weems

Auchtermuchty - As spelt but "ch" is as per the Scottish loch

Scone - Skoon

Falkirk - Fall-kirk

Broughty Ferry - Br-aw-ty Ferry

Feel free to add your viewpoint or pronunciations you see wrong all the time in the comments section.

Raisin Weekend

Ah, it's almost upon us - one of the strangest traditions I've ever seen. It maily consists of academic families getting drunk and finishes with  the children having a foam fight in the quad. It's another one of these uni traditions I don't get invloved in. However, the people I live with have academic children this year so I' ve got no choice.

Let's just hope they don't make too much of a mess!

A 64-bit problem

Just as my workload shoots up, a problem is discovered in AllDay DJ. It's an interesting one at that. It turns out that one of the libraries AllDay DJ makes use of no longer exists in the 64-bit Microsoft operating systems (Windows Vista/7) but does in the 32-bit version. There's a supposed workaround for this and I'm looking to test it as soon as I can get a hold of a 64-bit OS ofr my machine.

In other news, I thought I'd take 5 mins from my day to see if the code for v3 I haven't touched in a while works on Linux. It does! Check out the screenshot below:

[caption id="attachment_177" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Screenshot Of AllDay DJ 3 in Linux"][/caption]

In my humble opinion, it doesn't look too bad on an Ubuntu desktop.

Hibernate-ification

I decided to take the plunge today. Thanks to the magic of version control it's not an irreversable plunge but still a big one to take. I've decided to refactor the database code for AllDay DJ 3.

A few hours in and I'm most of the way there. That may be down to a bit of forward planning though - I designed the database code around the idea of "repositories". I.e. if you want to store or retrive something, you do it in the repository. Thankfully that all fits into the Hibernate approach.

Yup, I've gone for the complete ORM (Object Relational Modelling) approach. It has the upshot for users of allowing you to choose what database engine you want to use (providing it's supported by Hibernate) and as a developer, I see reduced development time and a better tie into the object model.

As with all things in life - there's a down side. Joins are a mix of being easier and more complex (depending on the object relationships). One specific example that comes to mind is the design I've got for the schedule. I won't give too much away, so let's just say the database schema in v3 is far more normalised.

3G Access... Fun & Games

It's a well publicised option for getting internet on the move or if you've no landline. That's why I've had to take up such access. I may as well give you the highs and lows.

Well, I practically live under the tower, so reception is excellent. The service when accessable is nippy enough though it can be painful to use SSH over. The joys of the round trip time.

However, I have run into a slight issue. Look at the line above again - "when accessable". Yup - I've had a few connection issues. Though, that's down to the dongle. I tried the same SIM card on a mobile phone connected to the laptop via. bluetooth - no issues. Just excessively slow...

So, it's the best I've got and I can't complain too much about the service. It does seem a little better than travelling on the X24 makes it out to be.

The Great Move South

To say the last couple of weeks were chaos would be an understatement. I've made the move south of the border. For only a few months mind you, but it's still a big move anyway.

South of the border is a big place. So it's probably appropriate to give you more information. It's Bath I'm in. Working for a small but well known company over the next three months.

Now, I've only been here less than a week but it is possible to give my first impressions of Bath. It's a historic place (but then where isn't?) with architechture if you're into it. The place is only a few miles from Bristol but seems to be fairly seperated.

I'm currently staying in university halls. Floor 8 at that! So I'll probably be a bit fitter by the end of the summer. Talking of which, I plan to make a few weekend trips out of the place during the summer break. I've been to Bristol before, however, last time I was in the place, the bus I was on crashed. So it's probably not a good move to return too quickly. But there are other options, I can explore the "west" or even venture east towards London.

Remote Calls - Some Possibilites

As part of AllDay DJ 3 - I'm looking into ways of handling networked programming. My understanding of most setups is that a single machine will act as the "server" and the "clients" await control commands. Well, that would seem a reasonable enough model to me.

 

However, to implement this, I need some way of sending information from the command carts to the clients. (Yeah - command carts - you will be able to have a cart send a network command, play a user cart and wait for a hardware signal to continue - cool, eh?). Now, I could sit there creating my own message passing system then hope and pray I didn't screw it up.

 

A preferable alternative is to look at existing message passing APIs. There's two for Java that I'm lookin in to - RMI and XML-RPC. We used RMI for the class team project and I must say it worked. However, it's java specific (I'm looking at doing other little bits in other languages) and insanely "chatty". A few minutes with an RMI session and WireShark would put you off. :)

 

The other option is XML-RPC. So it's a bit more open (I can get language bindings for things other than Java) and less chatty (a godd thing I suppose). The only down side - who wants a streamlined XML-RPC server running on their playout box?

 

Ok - it's not that bad an idea on a secured network. Certainly going to be more secure than opening a port up and hoping the String / Tokenizer libraries do the job.

 

On another topic alltogether - does Myriad v3.5 have any way of mass importing and finding the track ends as well? It currently tops the tracks but at Radio West Fife, we've not yet found a way to tell it "the end of the track is the last point the volume is above x%". We've got a rather sizable stack of music to import into the system - we're looking to avoid doing things manually (ignoring jingles). I've been informed we've asked P-Squared, so I'll await results on that one.

Exams

Finally, they're over. For the next wee while anyway. So that means I'm making the final preperations to go to Bath for the summer (yes, I'm being serious). I managed to land one of those internship things, so it's a working summer. Down side is I'm not going to be presenting while down there (or at least as far as I can tell). But then it's the old trade off of money vs. fun. :P

Prep and Show Notes

It's pretty much a requirement in radio - you need to do some show prep. For one, you need to know what you're talking about otherwise it's going to be a very boring show. I may go a bit far though, major links with notes and almost two sides of A4 per hour once the show's airing. That's insanely prepared.

 

However, there is also an ongoing argument over going in/out of songs. The official line where I do shifts is "do NOT talk over songs that end". Simple rule that I've never broken, even before I took the role on. But how do I know how songs end? Some playout systems will tell you, but that's usually unreliable at best.

 

My approach - PFL is key. I listen to the start and end of the song.  I've then got little symbols I put on the show notes to indicate how the song starts / ends. As this may be useful to some other people, here is the key:

 

Song Outros

 Song fades out.

 Song ends.

 Song ends with a sustained note.

 

Song Starts

  Song has no intro.

  Song has an intro. A number in a circle will be used to indicate the intro length.

 

In addition to the into time in seconds, I usually mark the first thing I'll say over an intro with an asterisk (*). This is quite useful to prevent me overfilling that intro. Most time, I've only got one or two lines in the intro. It allows me to enjoy the music as well. :)

Weekend On Air and Calling Out The AA!

So, I'm currently covering drivetime as well as my usual weekend shows at work just now. That means 7 days a week on air for a few weeks. It's doable and should be a bit of fun. This weekend also saw the team taking a trip down to the local highland games.  It went well enough... if you ignore answering a phone leaving the mic up in the studio. "Hello, <name> speaking...". Rather entertaining hearing it on air actually.

 

As for the AA. Well, I lost my alarm remote for the car. I could get in with the key but it set the alarm off and imobilised the vehicle. The guy turned up, used the small key (I had no idea what it was for - I bought the car second hand) on the box under the steering column and the car came to life. Ah well, you learn something new every day.

Stream Tags... The Good and The Bad

Online radio streams, you can do a lot with them. As well as carrying your station's output, you can attach all sorts of metadata. Usually you stop at Artist - Title, e.g. currently playing on my internal test stream is "Bon Jovi - Always".

 

That's the basics. At STAR we used to go a bit further with "Now Is Always by Bon Jovi followed by UB40". That's now and next which is on a par with some DAB stations. However this generated complaints! This was due to people using stream rippers and getting annoyed by the tracks getting tagged with the extra information!

 

As much as we are not to really cater for steam rippers (it does boost our listener stats though), I can't help but think we maybe went a little overboard. It also forward announced the next track which most of the time on STAR doesn't happen until the track is playing. Good or bad... you decide!

My Music Collection Is Wierd...

It's true, I've got all sorts. Heavy rock (I can't stand thrash mind you) through to the cheesiest of pop. I just heard the playout system segue Tom Jones into Van Halen into Britney Spears and finally ACDC.

 

I'm also exploring it at the moment to find out exactly what I have. What better way than AllDay DJ. I get to do a sustainer test and hear almost everything I have. So, I've scheduled a fairly random mix consisting of some categorised tracks and the "A to Z" (i.e. everything else) category. Let's see how long I can stand it...

 

I'm also facing issues with my wireless connection (still as ropey as ever) so the test box is directly wired into the router. I'm also streaming online (no, it's a private stream, I'm not going to give you access).

 

Though I did learn this week that (unsurprisingly really) you can get access to the DAB output of a station via. web stream (though it's locked down from what I hear). How did I find out - a phone call from somebody at the other end of the country monitoring the station output. Makes sense though, it is just an MP2 stream.

End Of A Busy Week

So that's it, Hospital Broadcasting week is over. I can get a rest. 9 days solid presenting... I've managed it! Not 9 days 24/7 mind you (that would be a bit mad). 7 breakfast shows and 2 afternoon. Ah well, it's done now.

 

I've also got most of the way through the team project stuff for university. The code should display and update the required information. I say "should" as the standard for accessing logs seems not to have been agreed on! Great with such little time to go... Though, a lot of it is down to the sudden major change of system more than half-way through the project.

It's *still* Hospital Broadcasting Week

Okay, that's day 2 over. I'm stil having fun. Who thought getting up early could be ok. Anyway the "smell" disappeard from yesterday (a rather unpleasent smell appeared in the studio just as I left). Though unlike my colleage at Perth FM, I can't complain about the cold - we're right in the centre of the hospital. No windows or anything. So it can get rather warm!

 

So, Bridge @ Breakfast continues at 8am tomorrow. I've been prepping away the last hour or so and I 've got some cracking content. Though, unfortunately the I'll actually have to buy a local paper at some point. Do the "local" thing. Hanging around Dundee yesterday didn't get me much in the way of stories to talk about...

 

That reminds me - I ought to do some coursework. I've done some team project stuff (a rather funky web interface with graphs to track "blobs") and have "THE MALLOC PRACTICAL" to get done. Its name is in caps as it seems like it'll be a killer.

"It's Hospital Broadcasting Week..."

No trip south of the border this week for me this time. Last year I was at the awards pushing my playout system. This year, I'm presenting breakfast at Bridge FM, where for the last few years they've done an RSL covering the city of Dundee to celebrate.

 

So it's an early start all week. Oh, all right, 8am - it's not too bad. It should be rather poppy music as well (I'm aiming to wake myself up as well). Now, let's see if I can give this pen on my desk away as a prize... well, the budget is tight! :P

Levels, Levels, Levels... and More!

Gah! It annoys me a bit. Peaking constantly for any period of time. It sounds horrible and sadly it's a bit of a habbit among STAR's on-air team. Even if it's not too loud it tends to be levels all over the place, almost as if PFL had never been discovered. 

 

Hopefully my new notice may get them to pay attention. It has large lettering, angry underlines and the required expletives (well, not really). I can accept mistakes that are corrected when you catch them, I do it from time to time. But listening to the output and not doing anything about distortion for minutes at a time... I'm not so happy about that.

 

And for the "more" bit. I've picked up the position of President of WiredSoc (Computer Science society). Let's see what we can do with Wired this year...

Election Results In

Well, they finally counted the votes. It's Phil to head up STAR. Is it unexpected? Not really, but it does mean STAR will now edge further into Musfund's territory with Starfields.

 

We disagree on music policy but it's completely in his hands now. I only ever disagreed on the basis we were too specialist - we're not competing with Kingdom, Tay or Wave but iTunes. Hopefully this year we will see money dedicated to a rotation based playout system (currently it's on select a random track from collection X).

 

Where will STAR go this year... who will know? But let's just hope we can get the listener figures up. :)

Blog Moved, etc.

Well, after the incident involving a complete rebuild of Wired, I've decided to move the blog into my own home directory. It's Wordpress and should survived moving between machines better than movable type. All the old posts have been moved over.

 

This week has been a busy one. Not only have I been working on wired,  I've also been campaigning to become station manager at STAR (we still await results).

 

At work, we've got a new website as well. Check it out at http://www.perthfm.co.uk/  It's better than the old one and has some content. Talking of which, I got my photo taken and have submitted the required material for the "DJ Blog".

Pointless Offers

My mobile phone company has given me one of those topup offers. I've topped up a tenner and been given 300 free texts. Not bad... until you remember I've sent 5 texts since Christmas!

STAR Studio Pics

I've just been clearing out the camera memory and noticed some pictures of STAR's studio. May as well share them eh?

More Airtime

After another phone call out of the blue, I've now taken on more hours doing work for Perth FM. So I now do Saturday breakfast and Sunday afternoon. This week was week 1 of the extended airtime.

The Sunday shift actually works quite well. I get a (relative) lie in and the first two hours are a request lunch type affair. Surprisingly, the request lunch actually gets a fair number of calls. Though, the last time I have seen the lines busy for request shows before, but that was a one week RSL for hospital radio!

I should settle into the new routine quickly enough. But until then, I'll stick to the all over the shop sleep pattern. :)

The RTL8187B

The RTL8187 range of wireless chips has been supported in Linux for a while. The exception to this rule is the RTL8187B. It's now supported in the Linux kernel but support is patchy at best.

The sad news is, the wireless chip in my laptop is the ever so wonderful RTL8187B. It works ok on Windows, so no chance of a refund on that one. However, I can (under Ubuntu 8.10) use unsecured and WPA networks. I'm still to test it on Eduroam, but the fact it works on the WPA network at home is a good sign.

Though, I do have to use the "sudo iwconfig rate 5.5M fixed" trick. For some bizare reason, letting the card do it's thing can cause packets to stop being shifted. Go figure.

However, by sheer concidence, the USB wireless dongle on my desktop uses the same chip. The dongle in question is the Belkin F5D7050. Thankfully, it's slightly more stable than the laptop card. That's as long as you don't let it overheat, which it does on a whim....

Music Scheduling

I'll be honest and up front - I've never done it as a job. I've on occasion had to create clocks for on-air hours and fix many scheduling errors, but it's never fully been my responsibility.

I've learned the basics though. Don't schedule slow tracks at 0700, etc. This is all being kept in mind as I design the scheduler for AllDay DJ 3.

Voice tracking is a huge thing just now. AllDay DJ 2 will do it, but it's not particularly user friendly. I plan to fix this in the new scheduler. Also dayparting is one big thing I am looking to build in. Take an example I saw at Perth FM - we were looking for an easy way to say "only play this promo Mon-Fri". Not too easy with the software in use. An intuitive way to do this without creating a million and one spot groups is something I am very much looking to build in.

So, your ideas would be great. What do schedulers (human of course) find difficult to do with software? Let's see if we can make scheduling easy... though not too much. :)

Playout Woes

So, we're a few weeks into taking the Digiplay plunge. It should be
stated now that no playout system will be deployed problem free. There
will almost always some niggle or glitch which gets ironed out and the
system works over time.

However, you don't usually have to recode serious portions of the
playout system.It's actually starting to worry me the amount of work
the team are putting in to get a system that currently limps along.
studio_play and studio_manage (the in-studio parts of Digiplay) both
seem to crash with various issues. It can hang indefinitely when a load
error occurs (we've worked around this) and on a whim studio_manage can
die. It usually works after recovery so go figure.

It's causing real issues for the on-air team. They are dealing with
loosing playout during live output and on occasion loosing the
sustainer feed. Not really acceptable and the reason why one of
Digiplay's outputs has been removed from the mixer and replaced with a
second CD player.

I can only hope we can get to stable quickly. It's simply not
sustainable to be maintaining a playout system at code level. If we
cannot get to a stable state in a reasonable period, we may have to
write the whole thing off as a lesson.

More Radio Fun

Yesterday, I took Digiplay on air for a spin. When it worked it was very good. Thankfully when it crashed, it didn't take the audio thread out with it. So I could wait until the end of the song and reset the system then.

I can see it being useful once stable and bedded in. Thankfully it wasn't obvious I was having issues when you listened to the station output.

Today saw me taking on two on-air shifts in one day. To say I was knackered by the end of it would be accurate. I'm not complaining, it was fun but maybe worth repeating with more sleep before the breakfast stint. :)

AllDay DJ 3 Edges Closer

I will admit there is still miles to go with version 3 of AllDay DJ. However, some rather major features have now been implemented. You can now play voice tracks / sweepers on top of other tracks, the basics for command carts exist (networking and waiting is still to be worked on), tracks times / metadata can be edited and you get a cool popup when double clicking a track on the playlist full of useful track information.

The next big milestone is the scheduler (then the other bits can be built around it). The current plan is a web based (or intra-web based for the security concious) scheduler. This would allow management of the scheduler and voice tracking from your web broswer. Not bad eh? There are a few minor issues with implementing voice tracking via. a website that I can forsee but otherwise we should be just fine.

Instant Carts, Command Carts and 8 Track Carts(!)

Ok, I'm only kidding about the 8 track carts - they disappeared from radio yonks ago (though replaced by Minidisc in some places!). As the title implies, I've been working on the cart system for AllDay DJ 3. The result of a day's hard labour:

A working cart system. Both station and user carts. There's no hotkeys setup but it works well enough and even triggers from the command carts.

Talking of which, I'm aiming to develop a networking command set. These will send commands over the network to other systems allowing for remote control. Cool huh? This should allow for networking between stations rather easily.

Oh, and of course, I'll be working on voice tracking at some point. It's big stuff in radio nowadays. Though, there is voice tracking support in AllDay DJ 2, I've never release the module as it's horribly unstable (and rather difficult to make stable).

Digiplay Deployment Continues

That's day 3 (or is it 4?) of DigiPlay's deployment in STAR and there's still work to be done. There is sound being generated from the system, the touchscreen works (to an extent) and we can import CDs and single WAV files.

Still to come - touchscreen fully operational (a backport of a newer version of Xorg for multi-pointer support may help here), a full importer and making our soundcard work. Hang on, I said we were generating audio, what am I on about a sound card for? Well, we've got a card that we'll use for 3 different outputs to the mixer. 2 sound cards for digiplay doesn't quite cut it!

We should be properly operational in the near future. Then it's on to training our teams...

Exams Over & Work Begins

Well that's it for another semester - exams are over and university work quientens off for a few weeks. However, I'm still busy as ever.

For example, I'm helping with two different radio stations and changes to their studios. One station is moving premises so a lot of work to be done (thankfully there's a team). The other wants to replace the playout system and change the studio layout. There's also a new mixer (their first actual broadcast mixer) to be installed as well.

It all kicks off with a meeting about a website tomorrow. No rest for the wicked eh?

That Elusive Little Bug

Every project over a couple of lines long will have bugs. Some even have that little bug that just causes you no end of misery trying to fix. AllDay DJ 2 had one of these. The odd bit is it's a bug in a part of the system very few people use so didn't get reported until recently.

So the bug itself causing a lot of misery. Well, AllDay DJ ducks audio when sweepers or voice tracks are played over intros and outros to tracks. However, if the sweeper finished before the end of the outro it never faded back up again!

This made it sound awful when a customer was using the feature for an automated weather forecast. How? The intro is played then ducks down for the forecast to return to full volume for the sponsor line. If it doesn't fade back up - you've got issues!

After a while going round in circles trying to hunt down the bug, the fix ended up being a two-liner! Go figure, eh!

A Working Holiday

As per student tradition, my holiday was not actually a holiday. Working more hours over the holiday period has been the norm for the last 3 years.

However, the difference this year is I actually like my job. So, I'd better explain what I've been doing. Breakfast radio. It's a simple as that.

I've spent the last week or so covering for the usual presenter and basically having a lot of fun. It turns out weekdays are far more fast paced - 2 news bullitens per hour, traffic & travel as well as the usual "What's On" guide. Plus the golden hour eats up an hour of programming.

The period also saw myself bringing in the bells on air and being the only live show on Boxing Day. So to say I've done a lot of work is a little bit of an understatement. However, it has been far better than handling customer complaints and queues all day!