Musopen Telford Update For Monday, Jan 30, 2017.
Over the past two months, some updates were downloaded and installed to the spare Samsung Galaxy Core Prime that I was using to play music into the transmitter. Unfortunately, I began noticing problems with the broadcast audio after that time. I wasn’t able to solve it, and, had been considering switching over to an old HP-Compaq office computer anyhow.
I took the leap this weekend. In addition to solving the audio issues, I gained access to a superior automatic level control functionality, a better EQ, More on screen info, and of course, storage room for MUCH more music. The looping and shuffling features seem to work better also.
Of course, the PC is power-hungry compared to the phone. As an interim measure, I completely disconnected ALL of the drives that have any moving parts: Hard drive, Optical drive, Floppy drive. I then went into the BIOS & SETUP screens and adjusted anything I could find that looked like it could cut back on power useage.
I then installed the Linux Mint operating system, and the free VLC Player, to a USB memory stick intended to serve as the primary boot drive. I did have a problem with the PC booting from the installed version, although, oddly, not the “live disk” version. But I found that the problem went away when I plugged a cheap WalMart USB hub / Card reader combo into the machine and moved the installed op sys USB stick there. Boots reliably now, and, the only moving parts are the fans, all turned doen to minimum speed, and very little heat coming out of the box! 🙂
I will also be watching the “Rasberry Pi”, and, “Asus Tinker Board” scenes, as they offer much lower power consumption. But, I won’t go there until something as versatile as VLC on an X86/LINUX box becomes known. The compressor / limiter alone is worth going to X86: it has the processing power to customize and maintain levels properly, even with the raw relatively uncurated files I am getting from Musopen dot org. That’s going to be very important when I get my A.M. transmitter going, and maintaining modulation levels are going to be much more important!
MY BEST TO ALL ON THE BOARDS! … 73 … The Signal Guy.