you people are usually pretty good at coming up with new ideas for features/etc.

give me some ideas to implement for tww radio. anything you want. if there's interest in it, i'll code it.

10/6/2008 12:05:43 PM

do something with voice to text like this during breaks:
http://notallmine.net/cam.asp

10/6/2008 12:46:01 PM

voice to text?

10/6/2008 1:07:09 PM

What package are you using to run it?

10/6/2008 1:17:36 PM

streaming is handled by a custom compiled version of icecast that will allow me to do DJ/listener authentication with tww usernames/passwords and will also provide more statistics to the web components

web components are php and ajax

the huge freakin database that the dj console runs on is mysql

right now i'm using SAM broadcaster 4 for the autoDJ stuff, this may change in the future

10/6/2008 1:26:47 PM

errr...

10/6/2008 2:08:28 PM

let people upload requests if the file isnt found on the server.
let people set end points for custom recordings, copying from the full length stream that's saved from buffer to disk once per day.

<<<####################################################>>>
        $##########################$                                                    

10/6/2008 6:47:06 PM

^the uploading stuff is already in the works

i can't do the custom recordings due to copyright/licensing restrictions

10/6/2008 6:49:30 PM

Quote :

"i can't do the custom recordings due to copyright/licensing restrictions"

you're letting people send you mp3s but you can't do something because of copyright/licensing restrictions - does not compute

10/6/2008 6:54:47 PM

i pay royalties for each song played

the source of the music doesn't really matter

read up on your internet radio law, son

10/6/2008 9:54:01 PM

evan, what about live shows? Like shows downloaded from archive.org, is this doable?

10/6/2008 9:56:56 PM

how much do you have to pay per song?

10/6/2008 9:58:46 PM

Looking at the different musical requests coming in from chit chat maybe you should think about seperating TWW Radio into multiple stations and make it a TWW Radio Network. This way each genre can have it's own station so you don't have people jumping ship from listening to their Metallica request when it's followed up by Kenny Loggins. Just a thought.

10/6/2008 10:06:33 PM

right now, $0.0014 per song per listener

soon, though, it'll be calculated as a percentage of our revenue... and since i'm actually LOSING money on this, i won't have to pay shit but i still have to abide by the rules they impose

^find me a source of free bandwidth and i'll make as many stations as everyone wants

[Edited on October 6, 2008 at 10:10 PM. Reason : p.s. we may have a source of free bandwidth]

10/6/2008 10:09:09 PM

Yea, the bandwidth would be massive for multiple stations (unless you do actually get free bandwidth) but overall, once this is generating money, would be worth it as your listener base would be more likely to stick around instead of bailing out on the first song from a genre they absolutely hate.

If you do end up wanting some more music I have quite a bit you're more than welcome to that ranges quite a few genre's. Being that I work really close to you it'd be much quicker to meet up at like Sam's Club than it would be to upload 1TB of stuff to you.

10/6/2008 10:12:56 PM

^^ is that a Verizon .0014 or an actual $.0014?

10/6/2008 10:15:46 PM

yep

one question, though: how is this ever going to generate any revenue? i'm pretty much against running ads of any kind...

10/6/2008 10:16:18 PM

Well, listener financed is an option but I'm pretty certain it wouldn't gain much ground on here. Ad based content would be ideal but that requires a listener base before it's really an option and you've already said you do not want to do this. Unless you are thinking very outside the box these are the only two revenue streams I can think of at the moment. Someone has to pay you, either advertisers or users and the question would be which is the easiest to get money from.

Edit: Let people pay you for guest spots. If someone is willing to pay $5 give them a slot where they run the station. It may not generate a ton of cash but I think this would be something people would do. You could also up the price if they wanted a scheduled slot on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. I doubt many people would go for yearly at this point but you may be able to get $5 for Monday from 1-3 for a week/month.

If you broke it down to $5 per month per time slot with prime time slots being a hour in length and other slots being 2-3 hours based on the time of day (8:00-3:00PM being split into 2 hour slots and 3:00PM-11:00PM being one hour slots) this may pay out well for you. Obviously as TWW Radio becomes more popular these prices can change unless you are willing to sign up for a lifetime membership in your current time slot that would carry a much higher price. This plan would need worked on as the time slots I deem less valuable may not be in reality but I think this would be doable. Maybe the 8-10AM slot on a Friday or Saturday would be nowhere near as valuable as a 11:00PM-12:00AM slot.

[Edited on October 6, 2008 at 10:44 PM. Reason : ]

10/6/2008 10:19:59 PM

Pay to play.

10/6/2008 10:48:27 PM

this is just a format issue:

switch the font sytle/size between the currently playing song/artist and the on-deck song/artist.

everytime I see the larger words, I think that's the current song. the current sizing just goes against my intuition.

10/7/2008 3:56:15 PM

^que?

10/7/2008 9:44:33 PM

I agree... the stuff that's "Coming up" is bold and is a bigger font size than what is actually playing.

Also, listing more items in the queue.

10/7/2008 9:48:42 PM

the queue stuff is due to copyright restrictions

(there are a lot of weird rules)

i'm honestly thinking about just ditching the legal route for now since we have so few users, then i can do all this stuff

10/7/2008 10:30:11 PM

how about an e-mail (PM possibly) reminder of programs? something you sign-up for?

this would obviously be when more programs get going, but I'd like a reminder of what's about to come up.

and while there aren't that many programs, maybe you could do some automated programs?
like have an hour/half hour of a certain type of music or certain theme?

[Edited on October 10, 2008 at 5:43 PM. Reason : .]

10/10/2008 5:42:43 PM

I think the tag on the previous song was wrong. (before dntel, suddenly is sooner than you think) it said gym class heros, but didn't sound like them)

10/10/2008 6:14:55 PM

higher bit rates, VBR ogg streams, separate streams for different genres

10/11/2008 3:06:27 PM

higher bit rates = sure, give me more bandwidth and we'll talk. shit costs money.

VBR ogg streams = coming, although this is of limited use to the majority of tww

separate streams for different genres = see #1

10/11/2008 3:47:56 PM

I already have a personal Icecast server and that's how I have it set up, so I don't really care what you do on yours.

I'm not really sure why you think people should give you bandwidth, buy more if you want attention this bad?

10/11/2008 3:56:42 PM

that was a very well-informed statement...

if people want a decent service with the features they request, they should be willing to also give back a little to help support and pay for those features

i really don't give a shit about your personal icecast server and the two people that listen to it

[Edited on October 11, 2008 at 4:36 PM. Reason : .]

10/11/2008 4:35:56 PM

^ why would that work for you with tww radio when it barely works on tww...

10/11/2008 5:23:07 PM

have you not figured out that no one cares about your opinion, omar?

10/11/2008 5:47:12 PM

Is TWW Radio coming back?

10/12/2008 7:51:55 PM

maybe tomorrow

10/12/2008 8:03:35 PM

most likely tomorrow

we're (^) having some server issues atm

10/12/2008 8:16:11 PM

fucking power supply

basically, im pretty much the most incompetent server admin ever

[Edited on October 12, 2008 at 8:30 PM. Reason : 

10/12/2008 8:25:15 PM

If a person likes a song that's playing, they could goto the radio website and click a icon next to it that would add it to their favourites. Then whenever they're listening to the station, you could occasionally play that song (more often at least than if they weren't listening).

10/12/2008 9:04:38 PM

Quote :

"i really don't give a shit about your personal icecast server and the two people that listen to it"

HAHAHAH

you should hold off on the attitude until you can maintain a 24 hour uptime on that hack job, and have more than 5 peak simultaneous listeners

my icecast server is for me and me alone to transcode & stream my collection to my phone and laptop as FLAC audio is not particularly portable

my point is that about as many people care about it as your shit, and I haven't been begging for attention on TWW for 3-4 months about it

10/12/2008 10:27:32 PM

^ youre right

my guess it is going to be up for about a month before no one uses it anymore

10/12/2008 10:39:40 PM

Quote :

"If a person likes a song that's playing, they could goto the radio website and click a icon next to it that would add it to their favourites. Then whenever they're listening to the station, you could occasionally play that song (more often at least than if they weren't listening)."

i like this idea

Quote :

"you should hold off on the attitude until you can maintain a 24 hour uptime on that hack job, and have more than 5 peak simultaneous listeners"

i can't exactly have the stream up while i'm finishing the code - and, how exactly is it a hack job?
once it's done, it will stay up... and we have three servers now.

Quote :

"my point is that about as many people care about it as your shit, and I haven't been begging for attention on TWW for 3-4 months about it"

i haven't been begging for attention
people kept begging ME to bring it back, so here it is
yeah, it's sorta fun and entertaining to do this, but i really wouldn't miss it if it were gone.

[Edited on October 12, 2008 at 11:39 PM. Reason : .]

10/12/2008 11:36:36 PM

Quote :

"i can't exactly have the stream up while i'm finishing the code - and, how exactly is it a hack job?"

apparently you don't know the difference between production and development, so I'll spell it out for you:

keep the last known working version and a good build around and do your development in another directory, on another branch, configured for another port. roll that code and environment over to production after you've performed *at least* basic sanity checks so your users don't perceive you as incompetent when it's down every other day.

for your production environment to go down every other day because you're actively developing on it is for it to be a "hack job" -- incomplete, buggy, visibly thrown together.

and don't give me crap about it being "in development", it's a fuckin' cop out considering it takes all of 30 additional seconds to do it right.

[Edited on October 13, 2008 at 4:04 PM. Reason : .]

10/13/2008 4:02:57 PM

im confused

this isnt mission critical so why is some downtime a big deal to you, and

are you wanting to use this? because you seem pretty interested

[Edited on October 13, 2008 at 4:07 PM. Reason : 

10/13/2008 4:06:31 PM

I just fuckin' spelled it out. It takes 30 seconds to copy the icecast binary, copy the configuration files, and update the port when you make a change. You can set up a persistent configuration in your build directory and let the installed version be your production environment. It's not fucking rocket science. I personally take pride in my work and feel it displays incompetence for my applications to be unavailable at any time. I think less of anyone claiming proficiency in IT and software development that doesn't. If that doesn't bother you, certainly don't waste the 30 seconds to do it, but your cop-out doesn't mean you're not a fucking clown that I wouldn't recommend for burger-flipping, much less professional IT.

[Edited on October 13, 2008 at 4:32 PM. Reason : .]

10/13/2008 4:13:01 PM

well then how do you avoid hardware failures o mighty it god?

10/13/2008 4:14:52 PM

If you mean me personally, at least 2 NAS devices backing software RAID-1 Linux network block devices, heartbeat monitoring, VM migration, redundant network hardware. The compute node can die, one of the NAS boxes can die, etc. Storage is fully redundant, compute nodes do require a reset but maximum downtime is on the order of a minute as heartbeat monitor identifies the downed VMs and allocates them another compute node.

If you mean in general, there are many approaches and the study of them is known collectively as "high availability". There are hardware and software considerations that can deliver practical immunity to single points of failure, and in fact multiple simultaneous failures for most high availability cluster.

[Edited on October 13, 2008 at 4:31 PM. Reason : .]

10/13/2008 4:20:48 PM

yes, but all of those things are for mission critical operations

not a shoutcast server

10/13/2008 4:32:16 PM

I wouldn't purchase hosting from an organization that didn't feel my application, regardless of how mundane it was, deserved something of a high availability treatment. I don't know why he's colocating and if he has any other clients, but if this is hardware downtime he might as well pull it out of the rack and take it home if he's under the impression he's ever going to break even like that

Seriously, I have had discussions like this with co-workers and hobbyisys alike, who are of the opinion that taking basic measures to insure availability is a waste of their time. My own brother couldn't convince me that he shouldn't maintain two branches of a game server he was working on. If you're going to bother to write it and make it available to other people, presumably you intend for them to be able to access it. There are things you can do quickly and for free to optimize the availability to those users. Why resort to a cop-out?

[Edited on October 13, 2008 at 4:51 PM. Reason : .]

10/13/2008 4:37:35 PM

i was going to type up a long and drawn out response to tiberius's multiple attempts at pwnage, but then i stopped myself, as i do not wish to feed the trolls.

suffice to say, he's a fucking idiot.

10/13/2008 7:08:19 PM

ah, fuck it - you know me, i can't resist feeding trolls

Quote :

"apparently you don't know the difference between production and development, so I'll spell it out for you: keep the last known working version and a good build around and do your development in another directory, on another branch, configured for another port. roll that code and environment over to production after you've performed *at least* basic sanity checks so your users don't perceive you as incompetent when it's down every other day."

do you even know where i WORK? i assure you, i know the difference between production and development systems.

if i actually gave a shit about this and had customers that generated revenue, then yes, i'd keep a seperate branch.

Quote :

"for your production environment to go down every other day because you're actively developing on it is for it to be a "hack job" -- incomplete, buggy, visibly thrown together. and don't give me crap about it being "in development", it's a fuckin' cop out considering it takes all of 30 additional seconds to do it right."

1) see above

2) where are you getting 30 seconds from? yes, for an icecast server compiled from the released source, that's fairly reasonable. unfortunately, icecast doesn't yet have some of the authentication measures i wish to employ for stream authentication, so i'm forced to code them myself.

Quote :

"I personally take pride in my work and feel it displays incompetence for my applications to be unavailable at any time. I think less of anyone claiming proficiency in IT and software development that doesn't. If that doesn't bother you, certainly don't waste the 30 seconds to do it, but your cop-out doesn't mean you're not a fucking clown that I wouldn't recommend for burger-flipping, much less professional IT."

i take pride in my work too - unfortunately, my work/school schedules demand that i spend more time on projects that either directly affect my job or projects for classes.

not to be a troll, but i'm fairly certain i've got a much better job than you do in IT and quite a bit more experience with enterprise grade systems that require 24x7 availability.

Quote :

"If you mean me personally, at least 2 NAS devices backing software RAID-1 Linux network block devices, heartbeat monitoring, VM migration, redundant network hardware. The compute node can die, one of the NAS boxes can die, etc. Storage is fully redundant, compute nodes do require a reset but maximum downtime is on the order of a minute as heartbeat monitor identifies the downed VMs and allocates them another compute node."

again, if this were more than just a hobby to me, i'd take measures to ensure high availability. it's a fucking independent internet radio station that i'm working on in my spare time. that is overkill for a project like this. i'd even venture to say that from an IT standpoint, you're completely wasting resources on a system that is not as critical as the resources allocated to its availability indicate.

Quote :

"If you mean in general, there are many approaches and the study of them is known collectively as "high availability". There are hardware and software considerations that can deliver practical immunity to single points of failure, and in fact multiple simultaneous failures for most high availability cluster."

as part of my job description, i run a large VMware cluster. don't even try to lecture me on HA.

Quote :

"I wouldn't purchase hosting from an organization that didn't feel my application, regardless of how mundane it was, deserved something of a high availability treatment. I don't know why he's colocating and if he has any other clients, but if this is hardware downtime he might as well pull it out of the rack and take it home if he's under the impression he's ever going to break even like that"

where do you not see that i'm not intending to make money off of this in any way

yes, it's colocated, and, yes, i have people that pay me for various services. i take appropriate measures to ensure their services are available as much as i can. this does not fall into that category.

Quote :

"Seriously, I have had discussions like this with co-workers and hobbyisys alike, who are of the opinion that taking basic measures to insure availability is a waste of their time. My own brother couldn't convince me that he shouldn't maintain two branches of a game server he was working on. If you're going to bother to write it and make it available to other people, presumably you intend for them to be able to access it. There are things you can do quickly and for free to optimize the availability to those users. Why resort to a cop-out?"

the majority of the things you mentioned to provide HA are not free - in fact, most of them are pretty fucking expensive.

you don't need HA on everything. your comments to the contrary lead me to believe you've never worked in an IT role at a large company.

10/13/2008 8:00:25 PM

I work at a decently large IT corporation and I can assure you that SexyJesus is not employed by us. Good god man.

10/13/2008 8:06:54 PM

the majority of the things I mentioned were unrelated and a tangent inspired by Aficionado

however, it sounds like maintaining a seperate branch of the configuration or runtime environment for development would prevent downtime for you, and I can't see why whis wouldn't be trivial to setup

10/14/2008 3:30:39 AM