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.
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