Geeks Corner:
Actually, Murphy called on us twice yesterday (... but we got away with it, mostly).
1/
Minutes before we were due to put Keithie on air (as we were sorting him out for some pix) the 19" Mitsubishi monitor on Laxmi's computer (Which Keith and Laxmi were using during their broadcasts) went black - and the computer went off --- power distribution block fuze blown.
It turned out that the monitor actually chose *that* moment ( in it's 8 or so year life ) to fail - and we had to swap it out hastily with a 17" LCD panel, and restart...
A few tense moments there.
2/
We used Nicecast to stream from the studio here in the UK to the station in the USA. This is inexpensive software and it worked like a charm reliability-wise -- streaming a steady 22 odd hours without a glitch. However, for my purposes, and in my opinion, it's DJ monitoring facilities are not great. We
have to be our own engineers (someone needs to listen to the feed to make sure the balance is OK).
I personally hate listening to my voice delayed by any appreciable amount ... and fiddle though I did... I couldn't find a way of getting rid of this reliably .. so if I sound slurred ... I'd like to blame the wine... but chances are it's more to do with listening to my own voice delayed by a few hundred milliseconds.
Maybe the package can't do it... maybe the manual is not complete .. I dunno, but it is an irritation to say the least.
If I can't sort that out before a next event .. I'm seriously considering trying the streaming server built into OSX Server and just using the studio here to do the mixes (although there are some very DJ-friendly bells & whistles on Nicecast - they are negated by that above)
... but "next time" is probably a away aways .... and who knows what will be available then eh?
In spite of those two glitches .. actually the day was pretty stress-free technically -- we got into the swing of counting down minutes until we were live to air (and had to moderate behavior .. at least a little) and the setup was really easy to use (delay aside). I need to try and get everything on the 30" screen -- using 3 computers made it difficult to chat as much as I'd have liked.. as you'll see - there were quite a few open and active windows.....
-----
I had:
A tunnel to the Station's SQL server (to search for request tracks) without having to disturb SAM
A tunnel to the Station for the stream feed..
A tunnel to the Station CLI to allow me to copy over key tracks if we needed to feed them from here...
ftp connect (up & down) shifting odd tracks around (not much on the day)
A VNC connection to the station control panel.
A tunnel to the webserver (just in case)
The website * 2 (one for me one for Keithie)
The windows for Nicecast (3 + a popup)
The windows for the Studio DAW...
all of the tunnel connections are nice and secure!
We don't have an impressive network connection like the Vaxman (that kind of bandwidth is still prohibitively expensive in the UK) -- that little lot above had to make do with a 8000/400 asymmetric ADSL connection routed via a 2-wire combined router-modem and gigaswitch. So we were a bit leery about deciding to download tracks mid-program.
thanks to Vaxman's excellent setup on the various servers.. it all went (from that perspective) without a hitch.. Thanks again Brian.
I had a huge amount of fun, thanks to you all, especially Jim for having the nerve to let us loose with such a dangerous toy
Jam/Iain.