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!