Centova Technologies Forum

Centova Cast v2 => Technical discussion => Topic started by: djlynchpin on February 11, 2012, 01:12:11 pm

Title: Multiple issues including playlist that plays on wrong day
Post by: djlynchpin on February 11, 2012, 01:12:11 pm

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?

Title: Re: Multiple issues including playlist that plays on wrong day
Post by: Roger on February 11, 2012, 02:48:15 pm

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.