Hi all,

Ok I’m looking for some technical advice here and I’m hoping someone can either assist or point me in the right direction.

The situation is i have a client who is going to be doing live streaming, and pre-recorded shows. At the moment I’m relying on the Auto DJ feature to stream music 24/7. I’m manually transferring music from our main media server into the Auto Dj Folder on a different server, then generating a normal playlist that plays this music.

To give you an idea of what I’m doing. The media server is a Windows Server and obviously the Centova Streaming server is on a Linux server. The good news is, because both servers are in data centres, the uploading of mixes takes hardly any time. The transfer is done via FTP.

With the Auto dj side of things, im not too concerned when certain mixes are played etc.

The main thing to take into consideration here is the length of the tracks. We are not streaming music singles, but dj mixes which are anything between 60mins long, to 2 hours.

The problem I am facing is the following and I’m in desperate need to find a solution

The current client is up and running on my server and the streaming is working perfectly. I’m currently using Icecast as the main streaming source. For example I have 3 different things that happen on my website, these are as follows:

1)   Live Djs – Simple, these guys connect to the icecast server, take over the auto dj stream, and once finished the auto dj stream kicks back in again.
2)   Pre-Recorded Shows – This is when I require certain mixes to play at specific times. For example a mix to play at 6pm GMT on a Saturday. Once the mix has finished, the auto dj kicks back in again.

This is where the problem starts. As mentioned above, most of the dj mixes are anything between 60mins to 120mins long. After speaking to Centova, they have explained to me that if an Auto DJ track is playing, the scheduled stream will not kick in until that current auto dj mix has finished. So in theory if an auto dj mix started at 5.55pm on a Saturday, the scheduled stream would not start until 6.55pm (obviously with the auto dj mix being 60mins long) Thus meaning the scheduled stream would not play on time.

I’m looking for a solution here to make sure my streams are played on time, and on the correct date. What can you guys suggest for me to combat this problem?

Thanks in advance

Tom
p.s. I’m open to any suggestions here, and happy to give a small donation to anyone who can help me overcome this nightmare of a problem! I hope I have explained the problem clearly enough