I have a playlist that is scheduled to play on Saturday nights. It has always done so without issue. However, it played on Friday night this week. I checked all my config and everything looked ok as usual, so I opened a ticket with my host, http://www.shouthostdirect.com

My stream is a 128 stream. Some of the files in my Auto DJ are lower quality than 128. I have scheduled shows that play old time radio programs. The host is telling me that my scheduled playlist is playing at the wrong time because I have files in my folder that are lower bitrate than 128.

Every time I have an issue with their service they go no further than telling me to re-encode all my files. How can birate of an inert file affect what time a cron job executes? I really think I am getting the run-around by my host. What do you think?

It's very unlikely that bitrate mismatch nor file corruption will have any effect on your schedule playlists, this problems are usually due to a misconfiguration on the servers (or stations) date/time settings.

The only way this may cause an issue at all is if your host had disabled re-encoding, this will force the AutoDJ to send the audio stream directly from the file as it is.

Even if that's the case, the issues resulting of a bitrate mismatch are buffering, long silences and total station crash.

Other issues that may be avoided by re-encoding are, corrupted ID3 tags and the use of VBR (variable bit rate), both of which will cause your autoDJ to crash or skip.