First one last [ irrelevant ] comment on the "Old-timers and rdairplay" thread and old triple decks:
Among the additional alignment steps required (as discussed) in the routine maintenance of these things was the issue of a typical station using carts in those days could live without a single deck being out for service, but it was often a big deal when they lost three at a time. Of course now it is much worse as a station's single computer "play-out" system going down pretty much knocks them totally off the air unless an emergency backup system is designed for. This leads to my current issue as in I was running off our backup all last night as I was figuring out a new problem: So I recently upgraded our on air system from version 2.5.1 to 2.7 (using the Tryphon packages). All seemed to go well until the staff started using some of the macros I have assigned to lots of buttons on the rdairplay button widget panels and some GPI's. So I'm doing a lot of slick looking stuff. I have a lot of buttons that toggle "states" as in toggle between two different macro calls, changing names and colors as they do and often putting text up in the "Label" area of RDAirplay and even sending some GPO's to far end remote equipment all while commanding Jack Audio to change some audio routes around. The ongoing problem I've had with Rivendell and macros is that with certain order and combinations of macro commands, certain command steps in a macro tend to get skipped over unless I put delays (sleep "SP" statements) between them. I had all this fine-tuned (put sleep statements in where they appeared to be needed) with 2.5.1, but then when I updated to 2.7 much of this changed and I had to put additional sleep statements in most of my more complicated macros, but then found I could reduce or remove other existing ones. This experience makes be fearful on doing future in-place updates as last night it created some hardship for the radio station during a broadcast of a sporting event that is usually wonderfully automated using Rivendell and its rich macro language. Typically the commands I had recent problems with were combinations that included "PM", "LC", "PC", and "PE" commands. I used to have trouble with jack routing commands (JC & JD) but those appeared to have gone away. Is this a known problem? Is there a "best practice" (like last night I put "SP 50!" around the above commands and it seemed to always make them all work again) when writing macros that should prevent this problem in the future?
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