Made a few changes the our dynamic playlist generation script.

This was mostly to work on better iTunes support. iTunes for some reason only likes "pls" extensions after a lot of testing.

I have been trying to point everything to our new playlist PHP library which helps with dynamic generation of RSS/XML playlists, PLS playlists and Windows Media playlists.

So I in the end redirected our old playlist files "listen.pls" "listen32k.pls" "listen64k.pls" and "listen128k.pls" to the PHP script.

After messing with a few things and testing this seems to now work. On top of this I have now submitted our station to iTunes to get added hopefully in the future.

On another note I have only just found out that SHOUTcast have moved to their new Version 2 Beta. I will be doing some research into this to determine whether it has any major benefits but it looks promising.

Since finding iTunes was very finicky with the radio I might now look back into XBOX support as I was having issues with the our PHP library for that setup as well. This may now be resolved with the ".pls" redirection.

I'll post up some details probably over the next week with instructions for iTunes and findings on the XBOX side of things.

Well as some of you may have seen the Radio seems to be going up and down a lot lately.

This is due to my main PC freezing up when I have been playing a new game. Since the music currently resides on my main computer it has been affecting the radio.

Now I had been trying to diagnose why the freezing was happening and as part of that I disabled restarting the computer after a blue screen. Now each time the computer freezes and I restart it the music stops streaming and locks up the radio and has to be manually restarted. Sometimes I forgot to do this straight away.

In any case one night I came home from work to my computer was Blue Screened when I wasn't even doing anything. On the next reboot one of my hard-drives in my RAID had died it seems.

So I have gone through the process of buying a replacement drive and received it last night.

I then installed it and expected it would rebuild and all would be good but the rebuild time was showing some excessively long times like 3 days. I could not seem to figure out why it would take this long seeming as I only have 1.2TB of data.

So now I am going through the process of backing up my data onto a separate hard-drive and then I will test all the drives individually (Probably breaking my RAID). This might take me a couple of days before things are back online. Might be time for me to look at the hardware RAID card I keep telling myself to get...

Well a bit of bad news. I had moved a while back the Mp3 data along with a lot of other general data (personal) onto a cheap and nasty NAS (Western Digital World Book Edition II)

This recently had a disk failure which I noticed and I was thinking of options between getting a more robust NAS box or a new Server which would have extra redundancy (Power supplies proper hardware RAID etc) and I could double up as a media center too hopefully.

Well my options were coming down to either the HP Data Vault X510 or a ML350 G6. Unfortunately the POS NAS box decided to pack in before I did anything and stopped working.

I tried power cycling hoping it might reboot and recover itself but no it wouldn't even turn back on after that.

So I am currently in the process of recovering my data through another machine which is looking promising but will take some time. I will then probably just run the files off my machine for now and I am hoping I might end up getting the ML350 G6 with Server 2008 SBS and just run everything off that. Depends on costs at this point.

In the mean time you'll have to chill out while data is being recovered and things get reconfigured.


UPDATE:

Ok well the data has been mostly recovered and now the Music is being shared off my main PC. The Radio is back online and functioning as per normal.

Will post more details later with final solution.

Noticed the Online Media Player was broken since the playlist changes.

I have temporarily fixed it for now, will need to change the overall player to use the new playlist methods in the future. That would be the idea plan anyway.

Might also look at making it utilize the MySQL database for relays instead of a half static method currently used.

Just a small update.

I didn't realize the Windows Media Player links were not 100% working on the radio page, spend a bit of time today revamping the playlist building library I created to handle the playlists better for Windows Media Player users.

These links should now automatically open in Windows Media Player, you still still need the Orban Codec pack for listening though.

Took this time to optimize and make a new class for this function too and cleaned up a bit of code.