[rfu-automation] progress on auto-enforcer

[Joe Futrelle]

comments inline

--
Joe Futrelle
Person


On Jun 25, 2006, at 1:14 PM, Gary Cziko wrote:

> 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).

I'll do that, but there's no guarantee they can help, so we need  
another solution ready.

>
> 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.

Unless the clipping is caused by Zara and not later in the chain, my  
proposal will work--unless we need the system volume all the way up  
on the automation machine for some other reason.

>
>
> 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.

Yeah, anyway my code can't tell what playlist is playing, but see my  
next comment.

>
> It shouldn't be too hard to make sure that there are no explicit  
> marked tunes in our daytime playlist.

My code can detect that automatically; we could have it run every  
night at the end of the safe-harbor period right before the daytime  
playlist starts, and clean up the daytime playlist before Zara even  
sees it. Then it can run during the day and whack any explicit tracks  
from the daytime playlist as Zara attempts to play them.

> 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.

I want to do better than that. My goal is to have my code prevent non- 
safe material from playing *before* it plays, and I can pretty much  
do that with the code I've already written (if it runs every second  
it can halt an explicit track no later than 1s after it starts  
playing)--now it's just a question of some details.
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