Sustainer - Listen Live when no-one is there

[shaun]

This is an issue that has been around at Subcity since the dawn of time but we've never applied a technical solution to it. Myself and gav have been discussing some solutions and problems and would like everyone to chip in. Here is a summary of our chat.

Current situation
When there is not a show scheduled to be in the studio, the website switches to brb (the new name for most wanted) which doesn't have a listen player or listen link. Previously it did have a link.

For listeners not going via our website at the time - including those who have the stream m3u saved locally, people who were listening to the previous show live, those on hardware internet radios, those with a link to the stream... - they will hear whatever the person in the studio has left on. Over recent years this has been party shuffle with a collection of music (which has never really been maintained or curated or branded).

When there is a show scheduled but they don't turn up, the website acts as normal playing out whatever has been left on but labelling it as the show. Shows are encouraged to skip any episodes they are going to miss but they type of shows who generally don't turn up are not the type to do this. This is fairly common with only 70-80% of episodes actually ending up happening (based on playlist submission rates).

Problems
The problems this creates for the station is one of listener experience and quality of output.

1. The website should not label content as one thing if it is another.
2. The listener should not be presented with silence when they expect content, it makes it seem like the stream is broken.
3. The quality of any party shuffle is always going to be poor and a poor fit for the surrounding shows in the schedule.

Solutions
1. The website should not label content as one thing if it is another.
We need some method of determining if a show has turned up that doesn't rely on the absentee shows telling us. Our options for this are essentially either make every show sign-in in some way to the studio or try and detect when no-one has turned up.

A sign-in based system would involve either making it so that you had to name the episode/submit news otherwise brb would show or building some button onto the website backend or in real life in the booth. This has issues because our shows are idiots and our website backend isn't amazing.

A detection based system would probably be based on a silence detector whereby we would ask presenters to play silence if noone is on after them and the website would switch after detecting x amount of silence. The issues with this option are that it doesn't catch those who clicked listen or visited the show's page before the silence (which would normally be 1 or 2 songs after the hour as presenters tend to hang on a wee bit to see if the next show turn up). The other issue is it doesn't prevent a show running on into another show's time being labelled as the other show.

2. The listener should not be presented with silence when they expect content, it makes it seem like the stream is broken.
Despite asking people to put on party shuffle and the like we still find the stream with long periods of dead air. Classic examples include the stream being included in the party shuffle resulting in a silent feedback loop and someone putting on a playlist of 10 tunes without looping it.

Our options to solve this with a technical solution are basically get a hardware silence detector or get a software one.

Software solution
Gavin and I have looked into a software solution but it looks impossible to do nicely. Basically it is very difficult to move listeners from one stream to another and then back again so we would need to have two audio inputs to the computer and switch to the aux input if the main input went quiet and back again if signal restored. This poses problems for how we record the stream and how we do listen again. Big headache inducing problems. I found this writeup of a tech at insanity in london making a software solution but they also seem to have a hardware detector according to their wiki so fuck knows if it worked.

Hardware solution
This is a standard bit of kit at all big radio stations and there are a few out there. Some examples include:

Sonifex RB-SD1 ideal at £350
Alice Guard Dog overkill at £710
Alice TXM-1 ideal at £459

We could try and make one ourselves with less features I guess.

3. The quality of any party shuffle is always going to be poor and a poor fit for the surrounding shows in the schedule.
The only technical type solution we could make for this would be some sort of system that automatically played out essential listening episodes into the sustainer system and ideally matched them to what was scheduled around it or whatever. I think this is more of an audio imaging human problem to deal with though...

[shaun]

Having chewed this over a bit more, I think in terms of problem 2. The listener should not be presented with silence when they expect content, it makes it seem like the stream is broken.

This isn't a big enough issue to warrant spending money or time on. The current itunes based system is ok. You could replace it with a dedicated playback source which was on a dedicated fader labelled BRB if the concern was presenters fucking up the party shuffle system.

Problem 3. The quality of any party shuffle is always going to be poor and a poor fit for the surrounding shows in the schedule. Is something the creative crew really need to decide upon and I get the feeling that any metadata based system we could come up with wouldn't be very good and would take a lot of time to develop and probably would fall out of fashion with the creative crew at the station within a few years.

Problem 1. The website should not label content as one thing if it is another. This is a genuine problem and one that deserves some attention paid to it. I will try to come up with some ideas on that side of things. I think a sign-in system could work and isn't really any different to how we do listen again at the moment.

Be right back with another post soon...

[shaun]

Right here's my proposal:

First of all this bullshit all relates to the live stream. We all know the live stream isn't a good way for casual listeners to access our content. We all know it shouldn't have the huge prominence that it currently does on the listen page and front page. Listeners on internet radios, saved m3u files and off the back of previous shows shouldn't be presented with silence but at the same time those listeners aren't necessarily expecting a specific show when they tune in so sustainer is not a big issue.

The big issue is when the website says "listen live // now // GLISCO" with a listen link that takes you to a GLISCO page with a player and then it turns out to be party shuffle or something else. We used to have this problem with listen again - listen files were generated automatically for all episodes and we had no way of telling whether shows turned up or not. We fixed this by only generating a listen file once a playlist had been submitted. This meant that we could just hide all the episodes without playlists and thus never have sustainer on listen again (except miby a wee bit at the start/end).

We could take a similar approach with the live audio. We could basically make it so that the listen live link & player only showed if for example the episode had a title and description or if a box had been ticked or a button pushed by the presenter. This would be an opt-in system rather than the current opt-out system of "skipping" an episode.

This would probably end up with brb on the now and next about 30% more often than we currently get. This opt-in system alone won't fix the real big issue which is the prominence of the live stream on the website. I propose we remove now & next and replace it with most recent or latest episodes. If the live stream currently has an opted-in episode on then show it at the top of latest episodes. Other wise just show the x most recent episodes with listen files available.

In order for all of this to actually work we need to improve our backend systems. Entering a title, description and playlist is a pain in the hole right now. It needs to be super easy. I have a lot of ideas on this but it basically centres around making one page to admin each episode from which doesn't take a million clicks to enter a playlist.

ideas for episode admin page

Mixcloud playlist entry is sweet we should rip it off

mixcloud episode info all goes on the one page. pretty sweet

[dave]

This isn't a big enough issue to warrant spending money or time on. The current itunes based system is ok. You could replace it with a dedicated playback source which was on a dedicated fader labelled BRB if the concern was presenters fucking up the party shuffle system.

I do like that idea - some kind of constant external sustaining source that can't be fucked around with, and if you're feeling adventurous, it could be made to roughly fit it with what is scheduled for that time.

How about a contact closure from the desk when that fader is open, which is used to mark that content as playlist? Probably way more hassle than it would be worth...

[gavin]

The studio iTunes gets filled with utter crap. The NAS based iTunes content was copied off the old Badboy and so was also filled with utter crap. These are both now wiped...

Now, if the concern is the presenters fucking up party shuffle, then the shared iTunes library on the NAS can't be modified from the studio mac. That still relies on the presenters actually clicking into the shared library, since you can't have a shared library as a party shuffle source.

[shaun]

That still relies on the presenters actually clicking into the shared library, since you can't have a shared library as a party shuffle source.

giving presenters any responsibility not to fuck this up is a fucking whitey of a solution really. I think depending on what cunts want the content to be (eg lots of music, station imaging, noise/tones, old episodes, mixtapes, another station...) we should asses whether a tamper proof source would be best.

what do folks think of the suggestions for opt-in to listen live for shows? and the related backend suggestions?