[rfu-automation] progress on auto-enforcer

[Joe Futrelle]

I'm stuck at home with a headcold and nothing to do, so I've been  
working on an "auto-enforcer" that could be used to watch the Zara  
logs during non-safe-harbor and restart Zara with a known clean  
playlist if it detects a given keyword of our choice in a track title  
(i.e., "[explicit]"). It would be preferable I think to have my code  
just skip explicit songs during non-safe-harbor as soon as it detects  
them, but I don't have the Windows programming skills to figure out  
how to do that at the moment.

There are some technical issues with how Zara behaves when it  
restarts that may require some reconfiguration to our Zara install,  
but not urgently since I have more to do to make this code robust so  
it won't quit unexpectedly or restart Zara when it shouldn't. The  
main one is that Zara doesn't remember the volume setting, but I  
think we can probably work around that by turning the main system  
volume down and leaving Zara at max volume instead of what we're  
currently doing (not sure if this is practical). The secondary issue  
is just that we need to have "autostart" turned on if we don't  
already. Again, if I could make Zara skip a track we could get around  
this problem.

Next I'm going to look at the playlist format. It may be that I could  
use a different strategy which would be upon detection of an  
"[explicit]" to shut down Zara, remove the explicit tracks from the  
playlist, rewrite the playlist, and restart Zara with the rewritten  
playlist.

--
Joe Futrelle
Person