Techie Questions

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I use Centova on my site and have a few issues i'd like cleared up by the developers.

There's a popular song out in the UK at the moment it's called "22" by Lily Allen. When I uploaded the file to the FTP and put it in the Centova media library, the title just showed up as blank, so I edited it and saw that 22 was there. I press OK but its still blank. I add an exclamation mark (!) to the end of it and it works fine.

Surely you should sort out issues like this, it appears the software doesn't like an all number title. This also raises another issue, in your recently played script, the track shows up as Lily Allen Unknown.

Also, regarding the "album covers", I have loads that don't show up, because the song doesn't have one attached so it just doesn't show up an image and firefox shows a broken image, when you look at the image properties it's just pointing to /ondemand/ but that's not viewable. How do I get my host to prevent that from happening?

This is turning in to something quite big, so I apologise in advance, but also on the recently played widget how comes it doesn't refresh like the now playing data does? It's possible to make it refresh if I inserted a meta refresh but I like the "smooth" refresh the now playing data does.

I use software called SAM Broadcaster to "DJ", and it's a great program with some great features like 'Gap Killer', would there be any way of incorporating that in to the auto dj software or is it strictly not possible?

I hope to hear from someone soon, and sorry for the very long post.
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There's a popular song out in the UK at the moment it's called "22" by Lily Allen. When I uploaded the file to the FTP and put it in the Centova media library, the title just showed up as blank, so I edited it and saw that 22 was there. I press OK but its still blank. I add an exclamation mark (!) to the end of it and it works fine.

Hmm, that sounds like an old-ish bug that we've already fixed.  Ideally you should contact your host for issues like this, and have them contact us so that we can get the necessary info about their installation.

Anyway, to explain the bug, Centova Cast always attempts to 'normalize' the artist, album, genre, and track names to ensure that, for example, "Lily Allen", "Lily Allen!", "-=- Lily Allen -=-" and "02. Lily Allen" are all treated as the same artist.  That's a good thing, to avoid having the same artist repeated a dozen times in different variations in the media library.  We do something similar, but less aggressive on the track names for internal purposes, and it was stripping digits in older versions when it shouldn't have been.

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Surely you should sort out issues like this

Surely we should, and surely we did.  At least, I'm pretty sure we did. :)

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Also, regarding the "album covers", I have loads that don't show up, because the song doesn't have one attached so it just doesn't show up an image and firefox shows a broken image

Again, that's a host-specific issue and we'd need access to the server to look into it.  A question mark icon is supposed to be displayed when an album doesn't have a cover... if that's not happening, something is wrong.

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also on the recently played widget how comes it doesn't refresh like the now playing data does

Only because it was not designed to do so. :)

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It's possible to make it refresh if I inserted a meta refresh but I like the "smooth" refresh the now playing data does.

Yup, v3.0 takes care of this -- it has all kinds of smooth-scrolling and animating goodness in the widgets, including an auto-updating recent tracks list.  'Fraid I don't have an ETA for you on that, but we're working hard on bringing it to market ASAP.

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I use software called SAM Broadcaster to "DJ", and it's a great program with some great features like 'Gap Killer', would there be any way of incorporating that in to the auto dj software or is it strictly not possible?

Strictly speaking, Centova Cast is just a control panel for existing software, and it's that existing software (ShoutCast DNAS, IceCast, sc_trans, ices-cc, etc.) which handles the process of actually sourcing and broadcasting the stream.  Neither ices-cc nor sc_trans support silence removal, so it's not something we can directly support in Centova Cast until they do.

That said, we are tentatively looking at the possibility of forking our own copy of ices and adding a few new features, so it's possible (maybe :) ) that  customizations like this may be possible in future.