Hi,

We had an account using centova for 12 months without errors.
In February we set up a new account and have encountered several problems.

We run the autoDJ on general rotation but also have live presenters and scheduled shows.

Our issue is with scheduled shows.

For example if we want a show to start at 8.00pm we schedule it to start at 7.59pm.
We have found that even if there is a track playing to 8:01pm on AutoDJ it will still insert another random track before the scheduled show begins.
This is a major problem as people tune in to listen to a particular show and find it doesn't start on time.

The problem is compounded if two shows are scheduled back to back.

If show 1 is scheduled for 7.59pm / show 2 for 8.59pm.

We often get Show 1 starting at 8:05pm due to insertion of extra autoDJ track.
Show 1 then runs late to 9:05pm.

You would then expect Show 2 to be next to play but not so.
When show 1 finishes late another track is inserted before show 2 starts.

So show 2 scheduled to start at 08.59pm starts at 9.10pm

Has anyone else encountered these problems?
I have raised a support ticket but not solution yet.

Never had this issue with previous autoDJ seems could be caused by "Liquid Soap"

Yes, I am having exactly that problem.  The Auto DJ inserts multiple tracks from the Standard Rotation playlist before starting the scheduled program.  I would definitely like to know how to fix this.  Anyone else?

It appears Liquidsoap is sometimes miscalculating the length of the track it is playing and it's contacting Centova Cast (pre-emptively, before the current track even finishes playing) to ask for the next track.

This is what leads up to an additional song being played between playlists.

While this seems to be a Liquidsoap bug, we are also looking for a workaround for this issue

Sounds good -- I hope a solution can be found.

Just an update to this issue -- for some reason, in the past month or two, this has suddenly been reported by a huge number of clients out of the blue while it had never been brought to my attention before that.  As best I can tell, though, this is how Liquidsoap *always* worked, so I'm not sure what prompted the sudden onslaught of bug reports.  But clearly it merits some investigation at this point.

Per AlexiuB's comment, this appears to be "just how Liquidsoap works", so we need to implement a workaround on our end.  And to do so, we have to have a number of elements in place in -- first and foremost, we need to have an extremely accurate length for each song in our database.  Centova Cast relies on the excellent and widely-used TagLib library to extract details about each song, but unfortunately TagLib explicitly avoids implementing workarounds for poorly-encoded MP3s... and unfortunately, many popular MP3 encoders actually produce technically-incorrect (or at least, "very nonstandard") MP3s, so it's not at all uncommon to find a lot of these MP3s in users' libraries.  And TagLib tends to return invalid lengths and/or bitrates for such MP3s.

To tackle this, I've spent the past week or so creating our own in-house patch to TagLib to allow it to handle a wide variety of, shall we say, "differently-encoded" MP3 files, and ensure that our song length calculation is as accurate as it can be.  As a benchmark, I calculated song lengths for tens of thousands of MP3s using Winamp, and then ran the same test using our modified TagLib.  Our test corpus explicitly included our collection of "misbehaved" MP3s that have been known to cause problems in the past.

In our test, the only cases where the results from our modified TagLib differed from Winamp's were cases in which Winamp either calculated the length incorrectly or was unable to read the MP3 file at all.  That is, our modified TagLib is actually more accurate than Winamp for our test corpus.

So that's step 1.  The next step will be to integrate our modified TagLib into Centova Cast, and then add code to Centova Cast to guess what Liquidsoap is after when it requests a new song -- i.e., whether it's looking for a song to play "now", or whether it's looking for a song to play "an hour from now when this song finishes".

Of course, that's going to cause complications when it comes to skipping songs as well; that is, if Liquidsoap has already queued a song that's not due to play until an hour from now, and you click "Skip song", Liquidsoap is going to immediately play a track that's not supposed to play until an hour from now.  I'm still looking into potential solutions for that problem and a few others; there are a few odd corner cases like this, and I hope this serves as an example of why this hasn't been a simple problem to work around.

[redacted]

Thanks guys. Can always count on you. 

well, I really cannot understand that a solution is not found yet so that the streaming source software to support interrupting tracks during playback