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.