I know someone out there has the answer to this!
I know someone out there has the answer to this! I am contemplating using some programming from the Internet. That’s fine if I’m around to monitor the station and see that everything goes OK, but what about those times when I’m not? I’ve heard the local ethnic AM station broadcast nothing but hum and noise for hours on end when they lost their Internet program feed and nobody was around to restore it.
So, what techniques do you ladies and gentlemen use to set up your PC so it will “self-restore” when the audio feed is lost for any of a variety of reasons, such as loss of power (resulting in a PC reboot), or network problems that just cause the feed to become disconnected?
Any ideas gratefully received!
streaming blues
First,have a UPS run your PC and modem/router so a power failure is a non-event. Then there is the transmitter and audio chain…mine all run on a big bank of batteries. I use Zara Radio software and I have it set to stop and restart the stream during every break(15 minutes). I can also use the silence detector,but Zara has a problem with this. If the stream restores,it will play it and your playlist on top of it. So worst case would be 15 minutes of silence. When I worked in real broadcast radio,we had a generic program on tape at the transmitter in case the STL failed. The tape would run when the link was lost. It worked great as we lost the link a lot. Hope this helps you some…
Regards,Lee
http://www.freewebs.com/wilcomlabs/index.htm
Silence Detection
by MRAM 1500 kHz
I have a homebrew silence detector between the PC audio and transmitter input. If audio from the PC is interrupted, the silence detector switches to an aux feed. Depending on my mood that may be NOAA weather, an IPOD or some other source that runs continuously.
When the PC audio resumes, the silence detector switches back to the PC audio feed.
ZaraRadio automation also has a silence detector (which has been known to have its own problems) that will force ZaraRadio to move to the next item in the playlist should the currently playing file stop.
Once in a great while the PC does crash and the homebrew silence detector keeps some form of program on the air until the PC can be reset.
The homebrew silence detector is fairly simple. The program audio is sampled with an op-amp. The op-amp output is rectified and filtered. That feeds a transistor switch to control a SPDT relay to switch between the PC and aux audio source. The “hang time” is set by the rectifier filter time constant which was set at 30 seconds.
Of course this assumes the PC audio stops. Sometimes a crash results in a continuous studder. Guess I also need a studder detector!
A couple of low-tech dodges
These suggestions are strictly low-tech, but they have served me pretty well.
For PC reboot, and depending on the OS, power supply, etc., it is possible to set up a whole start-up scenario using batch files (or whatever the equivalent is in Linux), or by using the start menu in Windows. Basically, you can set up a start-up routine that will open a browser widnow pointed to your on line source and will start pulling audio from the stream. How you do this deopends on where you’re getting content, but it’s something to consider.
For drop outs I’ve set up a reditrect web page on a host (like my own server space provided by an ISP or google pages) and then have the redirect page auto refresh every 15-20 minutes. That way if the stream is dropped the refresh usually grabs it again.
For a drop out detector on the audio side, I’ve also seen a circuit where the audio is rectified and used to charge a capacitor that holds a DPST relay to the switched side. If the audio drops, the capacitor peters out and the relay switches back to the unswitched input where you can have something like NOAA weather radio running all the time.
Experimental broadcasting for a better tomorrow!
Barix Exstreamer
You might try using an Exstreamer device from Barix.com which is a lot simpler than a PC and therefore less likely to fail. These devices can be configured as a ” streaming puller” to extract an audio file from a server. I believe they have a failsafe retry method to maintain reliabilty. If you go to their site they have examples of retail stores using this technology to “pipe” in audio content.
Gerry
http://www.chezradio.com
Airwave Freedom
Thanks to all!
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread! I appreciated all of the suggestions and will definitely be using them!
WEAK-AM
Classical Music and More!
I just use Winamp to stream
I just use Winamp to stream audio. I don’t broadcast this, but my experiences are pertinent to this thread I think.
I have often noticed that the longer I stream from any particular source, the more likely it will drop out. And, most importantly, it depends on the source. Some sources will go for days and others will quit in a few hours. It looks like some may have a “timeout” function. That makes sense to me. Why would a streamer allow a connection to exist indefinitely? That would just tie up bandwidth and leave them open to hackers who want to maliciously grab all the bandwidth.
So the real solution would be to detect silence and then re-establish the connection. In something like Winamp, typically you re-establish the connection by clicking on the bookmark item to re-open it. A quick Google search for winamp batch files revealed a lot of forum discussions. I didn’t read them carefully, but apparently you can conrol Winamp completely from a batch file. It seems technically feasible to have a silence detector invoke a batch file to re-open a stream. It seems feasible to have a silence detector and batch file invoker that is implemented entirely in software. Somebody must already have done this!
Phil B