[rfu-automation] progress on auto-enforcer

[Gary Cziko]

Joe:

On 6/25/06, Joe Futrelle <futrelle at shout.net> wrote:
>
> 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.


Since this latter would be a more elegant solution, it may be worth
contacting the ZaraRadio people about this (they have a forum in English via
zararadio.com).

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).


This could work in a pinch, but Stéphane found that  ZaraRadio's sound gets
a bit nasty (clipping?) when its volume is turned up all the way. We should
check this out, because this will be a problem whenever we restart ZaraRadio
with a new playlist.


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.


If we can't just skip explicit tracks, it may be easier if we just load up a
new playlist that we know is safe. But there is the volume problem.

I don't think trying to get ZaraRadio to rewrite a playlist is a good idea.
If ZaraRadio does encouter explicit titles during the, it will most likely
be because someone loaded in the wrong playlist. So we just have to load in
the right one.  We don't ZaraRadio removing all the explicit tunes from our
safe-harbor playlist.

It shouldn't be too hard to make sure that there are no explicit marked
tunes in our daytime playlist. So the error we have to watch out for is
using the wrong playlist at the wrong time.

Another idea is to use Scheduled Events to restart with teh correct playlist
every hour or so automatically every hour or so.  This would ensure that the
wrong playlist wouldn't be played for more than an hour. But then we run
into the volume problem every hour, with ZaraRadio re-setting the
application's volume to full blast with each restart.

There is also a AGC (automatic gain control) in ZaraRadio. I've played with
it a bit and am not sure if it really works.

--Gary
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