There is a problem with the system, again.  But the chances are, you won’t be aware of it.

I’d say that at least once a fortnight, there is some sort of technical issue that affects the station.  Mostly, these are wee minor things and are a quick fix.  Then there are long term issues that we manage until we can get the new equipment we need to fix it.

The long term issue we have is with the server.  It’s life expired and needs replaced.  The big issue that some presenters may have observed is that Myriad will hang when you search for a song.  We have purchased a new server and we’ll be installing that as soon as the Station Manager and the Chair can find time outside their full time jobs and family life to do it.

The minor wee ones?  Well I’m sorry to say they generally tend to be user errors.  Faders left down, shows made too long, or too short, or saved as songs, or going from very quiet to very loud levels and the system can’t cope with that. Or, my absolute favourite, closing apps that stops software such as Myriad Anywhere.

But this latest issue is none of these, and I thought I’d write a short piece so that members (if they chose to read it) can get an appreciation of what goes on in the background to make their experience presenting shows as easy as it can be.

It’s Sunday morning.  A quick check of the emails and I see silence alerts.  Specifically, one hour of our silence between 1am and 2am, then again at 3am to 4am.  We have a system that detects when the station goes silent. That sends an email to the Station Manager and the Chair so that we can take some action.  From experience, this usually points to a fader being left down.  I dial in to the studio and using Myriad I can produce a report of everything that’s been played, and on which fader they were played on.  If both hour long shows were on the same fader, that usually points to the fader that is down.  However, on this occasion, I can see that actually, nothing was played.  Myriad played nothing during those hours.  What should have played was the previous evening’s live programming.

Now I have a look at the carts where last nights shows are, and both are showing faults and zero minutes in length.  This is possibly turning into something more serious.

It’s probably worth explaining how shows get automatically placed into Myriad

This process occurs after every live show and after a few other shows as well.  There are some extra wee processes for presenters who provide shows, or do live shows infrequently.  The idea being that the presenter has the easiest time possible and the station gets all the shows it wants.  Also, at the extract stage, the same software also creates the listen again file for those who have asked for this.

This process was set up by myself, originally around 2 years ago and I’ve had to create a process for each live show, and listen again.  It probably takes 20mins for each time I need to do this.  So, it was quite a bit of work to start with.  And, for the past 2 years it has worked pretty well.  We maybe get the odd issue, maybe a windows update knocks something out, but generally this has been pretty reliable.

Then, something happened between the Friday evening live show and the Saturday evening live shows. There were no windows updates, no restarts, no user intervention at all and a process that has worked for 2 years relatively issue free, no longer works.

I spent a couple of hours or so on Sunday morning testing a few theories, repeating the process and watching it all remotely to try and figure out what happened.  I went on some forums online to try and understand what it could be.  

In the end, I’ve found the following.  Before, in Windows at the import stage our auto-importer software couldn’t ‘see’ the new file until it had been fully downloaded.  Now, Microsoft have made a change to this.  Now, the file can be ‘seen’ before it has fully downloaded.  Our auto importer software checks every 60seconds for a new file.  So, if after the 60seconds are up, it looks for a new file and ‘sees’ the new one, it will try to import it.  But, if it’s not been fully downloaded to the computer yet, the auto-importer software thinks the file is corrupt, and dumps it.  Therefore creating an empty cart in Myriad, which when we tell it to play, we’ll get an hour of silence.  Great.

So, how do you fix it?  Well.  I can’t.  Microsoft have made a change to their software that they feel will benefit the millions of users around the world.  And, I can see the benefits to what they’ve done.  For us though, it’s the exact opposite of what we want!  I doubt Microsoft would take my call to go back to the old way.  So, I’ve bodged it.  At the import stage, the Auto-Importer used to check for a new file every 60seconds.  Now, it will only check at 58mins past the hour.  Therefore, the file should be completely downloaded by then.  This won’t have any adverse effect on what we do.  Presenters who submit shows using OneDrive might now see that when they ‘drop’ a file into their own shared folder that it stays there till the end of the hour, whereas before it disappeared after about a minute.

In total I reckon I’ve spent 4 hours in total on this fault, and it’s cool, it’s what I’ve been hit with.  The best of it is, unless you were listening in at 1am on Sunday morning, you had no idea a significant time consuming problem had occurred.  I just wanted people to have an idea of what is always going on unseen, by volunteers who have had to teach themselves how to fix these things.  So, if your show doesn’t immediately appear on listen again, if Myriad glitches on you, if someone has left the wrong settings on the desk and you can’t hear through the headphones.  Please do get in touch with me or Ally.  But, please be respectful and understand that we are volunteers who are trying our very best to make your volunteering fun and as effortless as possible.

In other news - Updated the TX PC last week. For no reason it 'forgot' how to speak to the other computers on the network and blocked Studio One Pc from finding it, so 'now playing' data wasn't available. And, it 'forgot' how to listen to the station output and therefore didn't record anything for a number of hours till I spotted it.

Then, while trying to fix this fault, I restarted Studio 2 PC and it 'forgot' the log in details for accessing the server. That shouldn't happen. But it did.

I'm already excitedly waiting on the next thing to go wrong!