On Wed, 25 Apr 2012, Wayne Merricks wrote:
You can schedule timed events in two ways as you seem to have realised. It
basically boils down to whether you want the schedule to cut/cross fade at a
specified time every time or whether you're happy to be slightly off by
scheduling a make next.
You could have an unfortunate situation with a really long 15minute song
that starts 1minute before the make next so that is something to watch out
for.
At World Classical Network, a "song" -- they are none of them true songs,
because no one is singing -- is typically a symphony or concerto that may
be half an hour or more in length, so I'm very familiar with this problem.
To attack it, I wrote my own music scheduler that programs the day in
hour-long segments (but half hour segments in drive time) and displays it
on a Web page, with the amount of time the announcer needs to fill with
voice tracks to make it come out to exactly 60 minutes. As each track is
uploaded and the display refreshed, the time remaining will decrease. When
it is zero, the hour is theoretically precisely the right length.
I say *theoretically* because Rivendell actually has some "slop" in it,
such that 60 minutes of events actually take a few extra seconds, and if
every hour is made 60 minutes long, the day will run over by two or three
minutes. I therefore put a "fudge factor" in my scheduler so that the slop
can be accounted for, albeit imperfectly. On a good day, we can keep the
top-or-hour ID within a minute of the actual top-of-hour. In the middle of
the night, when no one is listening, there is an extra piece of music
scheduled just before the 3 AM break, which is marked "play immediately",
so it always starts at 3 AM.
It would be wonderful if the "slop" in Rivendell could be made to go away,
but it seems to vary from machine to machine. Even two identical boxes
running identical schedules will end the day at different times.
Rob
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