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June 30, 2004

ICYG Shows

I'm glad Scott's excited about the upcoming hour-long member-created shows that I've planned to start "real soon now" on ICYG. That's part of the reason I thought it would be a neat project: the ability to change things as we go along and add new features.

Of course, I want to automate as much of it as possible as we start it. First, I have to decide where the members who are going to participate are going to put the stuff they'd like to play during the show. It would be easy for them to just dump a playlist with a predetermined name that has local paths to the songs they want to play, but that precludes a member-mixed show like what Don's going to share from being used effectively, since it would be picked up in the normal nightly music scan and could potentially be played during normal programming. I suppose we could agree on a special subdirectory name that I could exclude from my song-picking algorithm.

But back to the whole playlist issue - I don't want to burden the members with knowing the full path name to their songs on my server, especially since it could change. I'd probably have to pre-verify that a particular show playlist was valid before I'd let the automated processes have their way with it.

To simplify things for the moment, I've created an additional FTP subdirectory for the members to use to upload their show content. Unfortunately, that means that content may be duplicated between the show content and the "regular" content.

Another issue is how the source FB2K player (via foo_scheduler) will treat the command to begin playing a particular show's playlist at a particular time. Will it enqueue? Will it immediately play? Will it blow up? Time to do some testing. ;)

I'll probably figure out a decent and more efficient way to do this later, but for now I'll just go ahead and release an initial schedule:

Scotbuff's "The House Of Receding Hair":

  • Sundays @ 8PM
  • Wednesdays @ 9PM
  • Fridays @ 10PM
  • Saturdays @ 9PM

Don Becker's "Up The Downstair":

  • Sundays @ 9PM
  • Wednesdays @ 10PM
  • Fridays @ 8PM
  • Saturdays @ 10PM

Alex Harden's "Nuclear Rock":

  • Sundays @ 10PM
  • Wednesdays @ 8PM
  • Fridays @ 9PM
  • Saturdays @ 8PM

For more information about ICYG, see the project website.

Posted by Alex Harden on June 30, 2004 5:55 PM |

Comments

Now we just need to know the date the first show will be aired.

Sincerely,
A curious ICYG Listener

P.S. Scotbuff thinks he did not do the pathname in his playlist.

Posted by: Scotbuff | June 30, 2004 7:22 PM

You and Don did well... I see all your stuff. I'll start the shows tonight. I'm putting together a block of Nuclear Rock right now.

Posted by: aharden | June 30, 2004 7:25 PM

Cool I am listening tonight, I will have to stay up late to listen to Don's show.

Posted by: Scotbuff | June 30, 2004 9:07 PM

I'm seriously flashing back to my teen years with all this Twisted Sister. I had the "We're Not Gonna Take It" 45, but I don't think I ever had any of the TS albums.

This is fun.

Don's show should be on at around 10PM as scheduled.

Posted by: aharden | June 30, 2004 9:11 PM

I missed your first show Alex, I saw your post at 9pm or a little after that you were starting last night. I heard a little of Don's, but I ended up turning in. So I will check them both out this weekend.

I imagine we will try to refresh the show content on a weekly basis. I am trying to decide who I want to do for the next show. I have plenty of material to last for at least a few months.

Posted by: Scotbuff | July 1, 2004 10:38 AM

I manually queued the shows yesterday. Tonight I'll try to get them going on their own before I leave town tomorrow.

Posted by: aharden | July 1, 2004 1:02 PM

I'm on the road; I think I properly set up the shows to go on at the right times. Did anyone listen to them last night? This is my first time trying to control FB2K by switching between multiple open playlists. Foo_Scheduler seems to work quite well for that.

Posted by: aharden | July 3, 2004 8:28 AM

The show names showed up on the ICYG website at the proper time. But the shows did not play. ICYG continued playing random songs throughout the time the shows were to play. I tuned in for yours and Don's show but the actual shows did not play.

I also noticed that ICYG is playing songs that were in the shows. I have seen Twisted Sister in the standard lineup, yet I have not yet moved them to the other music directory.

Posted by: Scotbuff | July 3, 2004 8:46 AM

Darn. I'll have to work on that when I get back. The code that indicates a show is on is time-based and isn't linked to the ICYG FB2K instance at all.

The TS stuff is being picked up because I scan for music at a pretty high level. I'll have to tweak this stuff.

Posted by: aharden | July 3, 2004 4:50 PM

I'm back home and already geeking out. I had two hours to think about these problems in the car. ;)

I've fixed it so that show content will not be included in the normal playlist. I think I've fixed the show-queuing issue - I might play some shows tonight to test.

Posted by: aharden | July 5, 2004 5:34 PM

I am trying to decide if I want to upload a new show for this week or let the current one run through another week. Hmmm...

Posted by: Scotbuff | July 5, 2004 7:30 PM

Well, I haven't exactly figured out how I'm going to handle loading up the latest playlist, so you might want to let it go for now. It's definitely looking like I'll need to standardize playlist type, name, and location. I'll probably post some show "specs" on the forums a little later this week.

Posted by: aharden | July 5, 2004 7:52 PM

That's cool, I have not caught your's or Don's show yet.

Posted by: Scotbuff | July 5, 2004 10:21 PM

Cool. Things seem to be working. Nuclear Rock is on now. I just need to decide how to refresh the show playlist before the show airs, to pick up changes. I'll play with stuff and figure something out.

Posted by: aharden | July 5, 2004 10:26 PM

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