Category: Radio Automation

I’d run across an issue in my setup where I would occasionally have a huge chunk of my catalog end up disabled, and wanted to find a quicker and easier way of re-enabling said tracks without using RadioDJ’s Track Manager; today, I finally sat down and did it.

Basically, what would happen would be some sort of interruption in the connection between the PC hosting all of my media and the PC running RadioDJ. When an interruption like that happens–say, from a kid turning off the machine–RadioDJ automatically disables the tracks, as they’re not available. To fix, one simply goes back into the database and re-enables said tracks. This task can be very daunting if performed through the Track Manager… so, SQL commands to the rescue!

In my particular setup, RadioDJ’s automated rotations pull primarily from three sub-categories: Regular Play, Limited Play, and After 10PM. Your install will of course vary, as this is just personal preference stuff. After poking around in the database, I found the IDs for those sub-categories, and constructed a simple update query:

update `songs` set enabled=1 where enabled=0 and id_subcat in (30,57,46);

…and to make the process a little more automated, I created a startup event for RadioDJ to process a batch file containing that command. Basically, the batch contains:

c:\xampp\mysql\bin\mysql.exe -e "UPDATE `songs` SET enabled=1 WHERE enabled=0 AND id_subcat IN (30,57,46);" --user=MYSQL_USERNAME --password=MYSQL_PASSWORD radiodj161

I may rethink the process at a later date and set a timed event to perform this operation, or write a php file for me to invoke an update on the fly if/when I put my operation into “production”…

As a nice little thought problem, I decided to try and figure out a way to interrupt RadioDJ for weather watches and warnings–and I believe I’ve found a solution that works for my installation.

*NOTE: this solution is definitely NOT recommended for any sort of broadcast use–that’s what all that wonderful EAS equipment is for…

My first thought was to hook up an old NWR to the PC and have a tone detector monitor the input–a thought I might revisit–however, I ended up settling on a solution where a message received via IM triggers an AutoHotkey script. (…this idea came after a ton of other attempts at trying to find ways to push data to the PC, rather than having it poll at certain intervals.)

Unfortunately, I can’t jump in and give all the good details on the AHK script that I made–this is due to the fact that your system will be configured differently than mine, plus I really wouldn’t want to have you put that much faith in something I had some troubles with.
But, anyway… the basic idea to how I put everything together is this:

1. I receive an SMS from the weather service on my personal phone.
2. Using a neat little program installed on my phone, the message is forwarded to my AIM account via AOL’s SMS gateway. (…which will eventually get shut-down–I mean, everyone’s been killing off their gateways; honestly I was shocked to find AOL still had one in existence!)
   1. The program (SMS Forwarder) searches incoming messages beginning with “New Event.” or “Event Modified.”
   2. SMS Forwarder then replaces the found string with “Send *MY_AOL_USERNAME* and forwards it all to 246246
3. My RadioDJ PC receives the message via Pidgin and “pounces” upon it.
   1. I configured Pidgin to have a “recurring” pounce that responds to any message received from my mobile number. I chose Pidgin simply because I remembered that it could execute a specified command when it sees/receives a message from a user. Another reason why I chose Pidgin is that I can tell it to sit in the system tray and not do any other attention grabbing or screen stealing stuff.
4. My AHK script–which has been converted to an *.exe–is activated by the Pidgin pounce.
5.  AHK loads and plays a preconfigured RadioDJ playlist–which only consists of a manual event for interrupting the current song and all other events.

As stated before, I really can’t delve into how the AutoHotkey script works. Similarly, I’m not going to go into detail on the creation of my manual event. Sorry. But, here’s the gist of it, so that you can try to figure it out on your own, if you’d like:

1. Pause playback of the current song
2. Disable AutoDJ
3. Pause all events
4. Load and playback the NWS stream from the database into Auxilary Player 1
   1. I found where someone setup a stream for my area’s NWS broadcast on Weather Underground. You may have luck doing the same…
5. Wait 2 minutes
   1. I decided to use two minutes as the delay before returning to normal playback, based upon info I found that stated this was the old “standard” for delayed return in decades past. (Don’t ask me where I found this–I can’t remember.)
6. Stop playback of Aux Player 1
7. Unpause playback
8. Re-enable AutoDJ
9. Re-enable Events

…as for the “playlist”: load up the playlist builder, insert the manual event, and save the playlist.

Obviously, there’s a lot more tinkering that could be done to the whole process in order to make it act a lot more like a “real” station’s setup–which is why I say I’m thinking about revisiting my idea of hooking a NWR up to the PC.

Unfortunately, there’s a couple points of failure in my setup–reliance upon my receiving an SMS, using AIM to trigger the playback of that stream, and the stream itself. If I were to use a radio and detect it’s tone, I’d eliminate those three points… but, I still face the potential failure of the radio receiving signal, and the possibility of having false-positives in tone-detection if I use and older radio that won’t reset without user intervention. (…I discovered that I’d need to do a lot of tweaking to the detection level of the given tone, as a poor quality signal can distort and create the tones I’d be looking for.)

…but, for now, this is a workable solution as I’m only using the program for my own enjoyment. 😉

For the fun of it, I thought I’d give a 7-Day forecast to my RadioDJ installation for playback in the morning–and maybe at other points throughout the day. After a bit of tinkering, I’ve come up with a solution that’ll pull my local forecast and speak it into a waveform file, which I have imported into RDJ as a “variable duration”–see my previous post for a quick explanation of that RDJ file-type.

In a folder under RDJ, I put the executable and dlls from GNUWin32’s wget port, and a little .vbs script (for TTS conversion) from the Jampal mp3 Library.

Next, I put together a batch file and a powershell script that would process the NWS Forecast information and create the waveform:

nws.bat:

@echo off
CD C:\RadioDJ\Media\NWS
:: get the forecast
wget ftp://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/forecasts/zone/ky/kyz037.txt

:: remove header, end characters
for /f "skip=14 delims=$$" %%a in (kyz037.txt) do (
echo %%a >>forecast.tmp1
)

:: put text into one line (for TTS readability)
setlocal DisableDelayedExpansion
(for /F "usebackq delims=" %%a in (forecast.tmp1) do (
set /P "=%%a" < NUL )) > forecast.tmp

:: filter NWS abbreviations (and certain words) and replace with TTS friendly pronunciation values
powershell -command .\nws-filter.ps1

:: read the forecast into a WAV (NOTE: uses the 'default' computer voice)
cscript ptts.vbs -w forecast.wav -s 48000 -c 1 -r 2 < forecast.txt

:: cleanup the temp files
del *.tmp*
del *.txt

nws-filter.ps1:

$lookupTable = @{
'50s' = 'FIFTIES'
'60s' = 'SIXTIES'
'70s' = 'SEVENTIES'
'80s' = 'EIGHTIES'
'90s' = 'NINETIES'
'100s' = 'ONE-HUNDREDS'
'mph' = 'MILES-PER-HOUR'
'winds' = 'WINNEDS'
}

$original_file = 'forecast.tmp'
$destination_file = 'forecast.txt'

Get-Content -Path $original_file | ForEach-Object {
$line = $_

$lookupTable.GetEnumerator() | ForEach-Object {
if ($line -match $_.Key)
{
$line = $line -replace $_.Key, $_.Value
}
}
$line
} | Set-Content -Path $destination_file

…personally, I love the change I have to make to “winds” 😉

The powershell script can be edited later, for when I inevitably run across other words that aren’t pronounced right. Other filtering may be mandatory with other voices/engines… For example, the default voice I’m using–Microsoft Speech Server ZiraPro–will skip over ellipsis, whereas Microsoft Anna reads them as dot-dot-dot. Your mileage may vary.

…I guess the next thing I have to figure out is how to handle “immediate” bulletins… 😉

 

…okay, so I just went to look for the previous writing, and it apparently never made it to my wordpress.com blog… hmm…

A month or so ago I wrote of how I was experimenting with playing locally saved podcast episodes in RadioDJ; while the process worked, it left a bit to be desired–especially when I moved things to an older/slower machine.

I’m still using Juice to download the podcasts–if it ain’t broke, etc., etc.–but I’ve done a bit of tweaking to everything else. First off, I changed the path to where I’m saving the episodes–simply because where I had things going was nuts! Second, I gave up on the creation of .m3u playlists, and went with using RadioDJ’s “Variable Duration File” abilities.

Huh? Say what?

Okay, RDJ has the ability to import a track once–as a “Variable Duration”–and will go back and scan it later to double check it’s length when it’s time to play again. …a feature just for this purpose!

With that new-found knowledge, I wrote a single quick-n-dirty batch file (using some Google-fu ninja tricks to help) that goes through the podcast sub-directories, keeps only the most recent episode, and renames it to the file that RDJ will be looking for. (I’ve also got RadioDJ running this batch as an event… so far, the performance hit isn’t as noticeable as my previous backwards methods.)

…so, anyway… to the batch-cave!

CD C:\RadioDJ\Media\Podcasts

for /f "delims=" %%i in ('dir C:\RadioDJ\Media\Podcasts /ad/s/b') do (
for /f "skip=1 delims=" %%j in ('dir "%%i\*.mp3" /b /o-d /a-d') do del "%%i\%%j"
)

for /f "delims=" %%k in ('dir C:\RadioDJ\Media\Podcasts /ad/s/b') do (
for /f "skip=1 delims=" %%l in ('dir "%%k\*.m4a" /b /o-d /a-d') do del "%%k\%%l"
)

FOR /D /R %%# in (*) DO (
PUSHD "%%#"
FOR %%@ in ("*") DO (
Echo Ren: ".\%%~n#\%%@" "%%~n#%%~x@"
Ren "%%@" "%%~n#%%~x@"
)
POPD
)

A couple days ago, I wrote a post about a quick and dirty–and half-working–solution to scrobbling tracks from RadioDJ… After further experimentation, I’ve found a cleaner automated way to do so. The method I’m employing scrobbles every hour, and reports the previous hour’s worth of tracks.

Additional software needed:

QTscrobbler–Command Line version available at Sourceforge

First, we need to build a compatible log-file–we’ll start to do this using the mySQL command line (assuming you’re using mySQL for your RadioDJ database–mine came packaged with all the other goodies in XAMPP). Immediately following is just the query, full-blown command line operation will be in the example batch file [scroll down for that hot goodness].

SELECT `artist`, `album`, `title`, `track_no`, cast(duration as decimal(10,0)), 'L' AS `listened_dummy_field`, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date_played) FROM `history` WHERE `song_type`='0' AND `date_played` > DATE_ADD( NOW(), INTERVAL -1 HOUR ) ORDER BY `date_played` DESC INTO OUTFILE 'C:/RadioDJ/Media/last.fm/part.scrobbler.log' FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t';

…as you can see, the query is dumping the info into a [tab-delimited] file; you’ll also see that for my own sanity, I’ve got it dumping into a directory created just for this, under the RadioDJ folder. Adjust for your own setup, of course. 😉

…also, you’ll see that the query is creating a dummy column–this is to satisfy QTscrobbler’s needs–it’s picky, whereas other scrobbling clients aren’t… and, yes, I’m going ahead and making mySQL do the UNIX time conversion–I had some issues when I tried to let other clients do the conversion for me.

Next, we need to put the audioscrobbler log file headers into the final part of the log file. (I did mention that QTscrobbler is a little picky, didn’t I?) For that, I created a static file in the aforementioned directory. Contents of that file–which I named “head.scrobbler.log”–is as follows:

#AUDIOSCROBBLER/1.0
#TZ/UTC
#CLIENT/RadioDJ

Now, we have to put the two *.scrobbler.log files together–I do this by dumping the head- file and then the part- file into the final .scrobbler.log file. [See the batch, further down this post.] With all that done, we can now–finally–scrobble the log file:

scrobbler-0.11.exe -c qtscrob.ini -f -l c:\radiodj\media\last.fm

NOTE: you’ll need a config file for QTscrobbler to use. I’m not entirely sure of what you can use or include in the config file–I ended up toying with the GUI version in order to create one that works. As an example, here’s my config file–minus the username and pass-hash:

[application]
version=0.11
utc_offset=0
tz_override=false
auto_open=true
del_apple_playlist=false
display_utc=false
mru=@Invalid()

[Last.fm]
enabled=true
username=YOUR_USERNAME_HERE
password_hash=MD5_HASH_OF_YOUR_PASSWORD

…ready to see the batch pulling all this off? I hope so, ’cause here it is:

@ECHO OFF
CD c:\radiodj\media\last.fm


::get_log
c:\xampp\mysql\bin\mysql.exe -e "SELECT `artist`, `album`, `title`, `track_no`, cast(duration as decimal(10,0)), 'L' AS `listened_dummy_field`, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date_played) FROM `history` WHERE `song_type`='0' AND `date_played` > DATE_ADD( NOW(), INTERVAL -1 HOUR ) ORDER BY `date_played` DESC INTO OUTFILE 'C:/RadioDJ/Media/last.fm/part.scrobbler.log' FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t';" --user=MYSQL_USERNAME_HERE --password=MYSQL_PASSWORD_HERE radiodj161

::build_log
type head.scrobbler.log>>.scrobbler.log
type part.scrobbler.log>>.scrobbler.log
del part.scrobbler.log

::scrobble
scrobbler-0.11.exe -c qtscrob.ini -f -l c:\radiodj\media\last.fm

::end
exit

To automate all this, I’m attempting to take advantage of RadioDJ’s ability to run commands as events. Currently, I’ve got an event set to run the batch hourly at xx:05:00. A tip to doing this–after you select RadioDJ to run cmd.exe, format the execution of the batch file [in the arguments field] like this:

cmd.exe /c start "scrobble" /min C:\RadioDJ\Media\last.fm\scrobble.bat ^& exit

…and you’ll be rewarded with a window that pops minimized, runs the batch, and exits when it’s finished!

One thing that I’ve been trying to figure out how to do is report the tracks I’ve listened to/played via RadioDJ to last.fm. With the little bit of time I’ve had the best solution I’ve been able to come up with thus far is creating a log file from the info stored in RadioDJ’s database, then uploading that log file via someone else’s “scrobbler”.

First, the SQL query to build a .scrobbler.log file:
SELECT `artist`, `album`, `title`, `track_no`, cast(duration as decimal(10,0)), 'L' AS `listened_dummy_field`, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date_played) FROM `history` WHERE `song_type`='0' AND `date_played` LIKE '2015-06-25%' ORDER BY `date_played` DESC INTO OUTFILE 'C:/.scrobbler.log' FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t';

The code above currently pulls the info from the history table–assuming that the RadioDJ database has already been selected for use, of course–and outputs all the plays for the set date (set by the `date_played` LIKE '2015-06-25%') into a tab delimited text file. As of now, I’ve found two services that will use the file created: the online scroblr.net, and a standalone client called LogScrobbler. I’m hoping that I can later tweak the query and find a way to inject the proper headers into the .scrobbler.log file, so that the log-file is more compatible with other scrobbling clients. My end-goal is to create either a batch process that does all that, and uses a command-line scrobbling client, OR some sort of php script that handles querying the database and posting to last.fm…

…needless to say, I also want a better way to handle the date option. And, finding a way to scrobble in “real-time” would be preferable, rather than this “bulk” scrobbling option.

Inspiration for this little project:
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/LastFMLog
http://www.audioscrobbler.net/wiki/Portable_Player_Logging