Season's greetings all,
Some of you may recall previous posts I've made to the list about
StationPlaylist Creator and Studio and the use of them at the reading
service for the blind where I work. Our reading service uses
StationPlaylist Studio 4.23 and the free included Nullsoft Shoutcast
DSP plug-in--with "Winamp" input set on it (even though we're using
Studio, not Winamp)--to Shoutcast our programming over our very own
private, in-house Shoutcast server, which runs on the same Windows XP
SP3 server computer as Creator/Studio. Our Shoutcast stream is the
only means through which we can get our programming to our affiliate
stations--an FM subcarrier and two cable television information
channels. Things hummed along OK for a while; my co-workers and I
hit some bumps along the way but those got fixed. We broadcast four
or five hours of local programming (with reruns later in the day),
and then we pull in a stream provided by a nationwide reading service
in New York, New York. (Some of you might be familiar with this
service. <grin>) All goes well during the airing of the local
programming. However, recently, during the time we're refeeding the
nationwide service, we have hit what we feel has become a major
problem for us, our affiliates and most of all our listeners:
Without any warning whatsoever--could be in the wee small hours of
some mornings up through after 7:00 (as was the case for the past two
weekends) or during broad daylight (as was the case just minutes
ago)--the StationPlaylist Studio Engine freezes. I get to the
station the next time I can get in, I take a look at the Studio log
for the day we went down, and the log says "Studio Engine timed out",
then "Too many timeouts, terminating engine, engine
terminated". Then almost immediately the stream somehow starts back
up again, but meanwhile the connection between us and our affiliate
stations had been closed. Then my co-worker and/or I have to
scramble to notify our affiliates' engineers of the problem and tell
them to bring our stream back up again on their stations. Meanwhile,
until the engineers do bring us back up on their stations, we're off
the air. When our stream comes back up after a Studio engine freeze,
a top-up track is played. As I mentioned, this problem simply
happens without warning, during the time we refeed the national
service. Below I'll give you the specs of our automation server computer.
Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 3
40-gig hard drive with over a gig of RAM (don't know how much exactly)
Sigmatel on-board soundcard
computer is wired to control board and patch bay
StationPlaylist private Nullsoft Shoutcast Server with six listener
capacity and streaming 64KBPS mono (two "listeners" are connected at
any time to get our stream)
Scheduler/Studio Version 4.23
Nullsoft Shoutcast DSP and SQRSoft Compressor/Limitor used by
StationPlaylist Studio
Any ideas on what could be causing the above problem and how one can
go about solving it would be oh-so-greatly appreciated. You can
email me at jimhun...@comcast.net. You can Skype me at
jimhunt76. (If you're really nice and your suggestion helpful, I
might even email you a little thank-you/Happy Holidays gift.)
Happy holidays to all,
Jim
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