HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

[DJ_Zath]

BOO! hehe  just popping in to wish everyone a safe and fun Halloween :wink: :devil:

[Jigger]

Thank you Zath Happy Thtiller

[milky]

Hi Zath. Halloween isn't a thing in my household, but it seems to be getting some traction in Australia with stores selling the costumes etc.

It's a bit like the upcoming Xmas celebrations. Depressing time for a lot of people.
I'm a grinch and I know it. Bah Humbug!

[DJ_Zath]

Milky:  yeah, Halloween is a "pre-sell" to the BIG SELL (Xmas); guess they want to get as much as they can!  (at least I get to do broadcasts hehe)

Oh!  speaking of..  I FINALLY brought WARP into the 21st century by ditching the old processing racks and now doing all the processing and MPX generation in SOFTWARE! I'm still working on it, of course, but it is coming along nicely; as of this writing, WARP is the BEST-sounding station on the local FM dial.. and I mean by a LONG shot!  and now I get more exciting things (like RDS/RBDS) too I got Ots and Aero (BAO derivative) running happily on a single PC under Windows 11.. and its been really stable, too! I'm still using the audio console for input of local programming and stuff like remote feeds, tapes, records, CDs, and even my own (horrid) keyboard-playing! hehe and even the DJ controller with VIDEO- all running  together in-harmony with meta, RDS* stream titles, auto switch-overs.. all of it and all in an APPLIANCE environment (yes UWF in Windows 11...  PHUN!)

* I still have a ways to go, though...  I have the RDS engine in-place, but the software itself doesn't seem to have the configurations for it?! GO FIGURE! (I wonder if either I'm missing a module or someones been full of %#$ telling the software supports it out of the box) the transmission system supports it and all that.. I just need to get it into the carrier! heh

anyhow.. I've been a busy rat as of lately hehe

[Jigger]

Its Good Zath that you are progressing and it does sound that you are very busy. Just tried Alexa to play WARP radio says its having a problem at the moment , I will try it again later, could be that I am in the UK.

[milky]

Sounds like you've been busy. Bite the bullet and set up the trial version of BreakawayOne. It is fully functional out of the box, but it will drop a voice-over "plug" in every now and then until it is registered. That will give you HD and FM cores (even AM if you want to go there), streaming, RDS etc, etc and there's a big new announcement coming up soon.

[Kev]

I am another Bah Humbug for Haloween, it was never a huge thing in the UK. Then the UK saw how America treated it and now we have full houses and gardens decorated. Boo!

Good to see you're keeping busy Zath! For your RDS box, does it have HTTP? One unit I used allowed queries by browser so you could send an RT = Artist - Title with some clever tomfoolery.

[DJ_Zath]

wow! so much to reply to!  heh let's get started...

1..  Hi Jigger!  Sorry that I wasn't on at the time that you tried, lately, I'm been on in the late afternoons and evenings  I'n actually been in "service mode" and haven't been doing much actual broadcasting... but I'll try to be on a bit more consistently so that you can catch the program (I realize that I'm probably on too late for you to catch me, you may catch me in the morning before work )

2..  Hi Milky!  Aero, the program I'm using, IS a derivative of BAO; its also part of the Telos Bitstream system and is meant for professional use.  The "catch" here, is that it was meant for a specific piece of hardware, and so, there is some trickery happening to "fool" it into thinking its running on said hardware when it is actually running on BETTER hardware- a PC with more resources! it generates the MPX for FM (digitally-derived) and has its own dedicated soundcard while it also handles meta, At the time of this writing, although it CAN generate the audio (FLAC) streams, it seems to do it poorly, so I have FFMPEG generate the FLAC streams instead (and OBS generates the video with 2 cameras and AAC) The other part is that its meant to run "stand alone" but I got other things happening on the same box as well... and its all running together (and theres no virtualization, hyper visors, etc to get slop in the way!) and best of all, NO SKIPS, BLIPS, STALLS, TEARS, etc.; Ots runs [almost] PERFECTLY! (there IS a strange issue when the DJ/MIDI controller is inline where the track PITCH will change- usually jumps up but sometimes it jumps down, not sure why its doing this... its something to do with Windows 11 and its MIDI driver, that much I have determined.  If the controller is unplugged, the issue doesn't happen at all)

3..  Hi Kev!  nice to see ya still kickin'!   you asked: does the box have http support and stuff?  YES! I have FULL meta support, however, because its behind an aggressive firewall, access to the internwebs is quite restricted so I disabled the local http stuff (the website, along with the video streams on kick, twitch, Odysee, etc. AND the standalone audio feeds (including Alexa) all have full meta support AND when I get it working, I will have full meta support on the RADIO as well! PHUN!)  At the time of this writing, I still have to get a hold of one of my admins who was on the development team for Aero and, so I'll consult him on getting the RDS/RBDS portion working (he is down with COVID, so getting ahold of him is scarce at best- I'm rather he get rest than get stressed out with my crazyness heh)  Another side note: the stations around here, the ones with RDS anyways, don't seem to have ANY meta support AT ALL!  they either display a static message, call letters, or ADs!; only ONE station has song titles- and its not even the full title!  MY RDS will have SHOW NAMES, SONG NAMES and ARTIST NAMES and when remote DJs come on, they / their meta will be pushed to air as well (I also have to option to override meta, switch it off, manually enter messages, etc).

[Ken Fusion]

Zath,

You have one of the most complicated setups I've seen here. Wild! Thanks for sharing the details.

I'm moving my little streaming boxes to Windows 11 Enterprise IoT LTSC. The goodness in this is that it has no bloat - no Co-Pilot, Photo Viewer, Snipping Tool, To Do, Outlook, Teams, etc. - not even the Windows Store. It never downloads new features, only security updates, and it is supported until 2030 something.

Been wanting to ask you about your Alexa trick - is it through your stream host or did you write a skill?