cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by The Daring Librarian
One of the things the veterans of ds106 radio miss with the new station software is the ability for the @ds106radio twitterbot to recognize when a live braodcast has been started. I have full confidence Grant Potter will sort it out.
Tonight, I was fiddling with a live broadcast from my hotel room in Japan, just playing some iTunes music via Nicecast. Rowan Peter called out for a voice over, so I switched over to my preferred Ladiocast mixer sert up. I was curious though, there is a setting in Ladiocast I do not see in Nicecast, to edit the metadata being sent out with the stream. Usually it’s the song info from iTunes, but there is a setting under Ladiocast (Streamer 1 -> Metadata) where you can update/override what is being sent out.
So I tried making a new setting here:
So if I out in a status with LIVE in it, at least I could get the twitter bot to message it:
@cogdog LIVE on #ds106radio check out my status twitter bot
— DS106 Radio (@ds106radio) March 9, 2013
and for fun, I changed it one more time
@cogdog LIVE on #ds106radio demoing a metadata annoucement
— DS106 Radio (@ds106radio) March 9, 2013
Of course, this is not a viable solution, as only a few people use Ladiocast and it is manual, but at last it does do an announcement- I am guessing ti changes the feed that the twitter bot is checking (?)
This is your regular arcane technical note, more to me than anyone else.
The way the bot works with live streams is broken because it used to use an IF statement to check whether a mountpoint called /live existed and if it did it structured the tweet with “Live now with X” where X was the stream title. The new radio doesn’t create a mountpoint for live streams, it just interrupts the existing content of the same mountpoint so we have to figure out some way for the bot to know that it’s a live broadcast. For now, as you mention, it’s just grabbing and tweeting any new song title (which makes sense during autoDJ and even for broadcasters that send song title metadata in their broadcast, but not live single-track broadcasts with no song title).
What is the bot looking at? Is it an RSS feed? We proba need to look at something that could append a hash tag or something to the stream meta data when a live cast breaks in. Maybe a short term fix is some code a broadcaster can use in the stream description to denote? e.g. “#ds106radioLIVE with @cogdog”
It’s an HTML scraper that checks the Icecast status page. Checking for specific text like “Live” in any of the field is definitely doable. Aspar as a long term fix I’m just not sure what gets sent to the server that Icecast could use to denote a live broadcast. Grant would know that angle better and may have ideas. I’ll email you the code the bot is using so you can see how it works.