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OAS Playout trials
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These are the results of my efforts to put together a 1 hour pseudo-broadcast using the kit I have here and OAS Playout - principally to see how it performs in general use and to identify areas for improvement. Occassionally these trials are webcast via Shoutcast servers.
Environment
System is an AMD Athlon/XP 1.4Ghz (128MB RAM) running Windows 2000 with 2 PCI sound cards - SBLive and SB PCI128. Audio is held on a networked Linux machine via Samba shares linked via 100MB ethernet.
The whole lot is in a spare bedroom. Outputs from each soundcard are fed into a mixer along with Mic, CD and tape. Mixed output is fed to amp and minidisc for recording. Optionally output is also fed back into the SBLive for streaming purposes - the Shoutcast servers are hosted on the Linux machine which is my gateway onto the 'net (ADSL). These are normally backed up by other folk having ADSL connections forming a reasonable Shoutcast cluster server - it's all clever stuff....
The mixer is a home made job (circa '93) - amazingly enough still working although it's beginning to show some wear and tear now, crackles on the faders, channel drop outs that sort of thing but suffices. It provides 3 stereo channels, 2 mono and 2 mic channels.
Trial logs
Most recent first....
5. OAS Playout v2.5/3.0a, 12/12/04
(In between this webcast and the April one, a 4 hour "Image special" was put together from the Image Communications centre at Luton, UK - read all about it here)
Shoutcast streamed out on a Sunday evening using the current retail release and an early enhanced v3 release.
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Duration: 120 minutes, split at 60min here & 60min relayed from "Image studios, Luton" Generally things went well but were a little started and getting set up (the relay from Luton in particular) and the handover wasn't particularly smooth. In general, Jim broadcasts first then hands over to me - I host the Shoutcast cluster so it's fairly easy to do. Going the other way is a bit more tricky as there was no "trial" and we discovered something in the order of a 4 minute round trip delay. I was using pretty much the current v2.5 release which is fairly well stabilised whilst Jim continued with the enhanced 1280x1024 v3 variant - the same software as used in the July broadcast - a key difference being he has now gone from the troublesome Win98 installation to XP. I think this has significantly improved matters on the reliability and stability front. Of a possible significant note is I noted (and it's recorded as well) one hiccup occur in my slow - a slight skip. It's the first time I've noticed this crop up on my machine but is is very similar to those experienced during this year's Hastings Rock broadcast. Possibly of relevence is that I too was running a webcam for the duration of the webcast which was the prime suspect for the cause of the "hiccups" then. Something to monitor for the future then.... You can read another short write up and relive the audio experience on the Image website. |
4. OAS Playout v2.4, 18/04/04
Shoutcast streamed out on a Sunday evening in preparation for making v2.4 as the next retail release.
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Duration: 120 minutes, split at 60min here & 60min relayed from "Image studios, Luton" This particular webcast went extremely well, we had no technical problems arising at all, either with the software or streaming side of things (see previous trial logs for Shoutcast relaying from remote studios) and I'm very happy with how the whole thing went. The actual 120 minute webcast followed on from 48hrs back to back automation of music from the Hastings Rock database, in order to prove that side of the software & the new server being deployed for the May broadcasts. This also performed seamlessly & a comparison of the Playlist I fed into it versus the music 'log' generated by Playout of tracks actually played were identical indicating nothing was missed or skipped. I gave Jim a very early pre-release of Playout V3.0 to have a play with for the first hour with the new look 1280x1024 display to try out on his flat panel LCD, this performed faultlessly - much to my surprise as quite a lot has been changing in this release. If any network hiccups did occur, the new buffered audio core dealt with them without issue. I used the current build of Playout v2.4 (utilising the same session that had just completed 48hr automation sequence) during the 2nd hour which also performed flawlessly. This will shortly become the latest retail variant. Read another write up and with picture(!) on the Image website. |
3. OAS Playout v2.2/v2.3, 07/12/03
Shoutcast streamed out on a Sunday evening in preparation for making v2.3 as the next retail release.
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Duration: 120 minutes, split as 60min from here & 60min from "Image studios, Luton" 1st Hour: This was another attempt at the 'remote' studio operation whereby the first hour is relayed via a private Shoutcast server from the 'Image' studios in Luton, then re-encoded out publically. Last time due to network problems the inbound stream proved very unreliable however those issues have been resolved & the result was a good hour with no real technical issues - this using Playout v2.2. The only significant issue arising was an audio 'stutter' which occurred once half way through a track. Unfortunatly this has also been occuring on & off here with the newer releases of Playout & whilst I am fairly confident this is purely a network related issue is definately something to investigate. Watch the Development page for more info on this. On listening back to the stream recording I also noticed what appeared to be some 'skipping' on tracks although this may well be down to the Shoutcast stream itself rather than anything else - this using a very similar hardware setup as the previous ImageFM broadcast last year which exhibited some unusual problems. 2nd Hour: Back to the local studio for this, I used the latest v2.3 release for my show which is only a relatively minor update to the previous version. Didn't spot any technical problems throughout this & all went fairly smoothly. In all we felt it all went pretty well, especially considering the difficulties which occurred doing the relay last time around. The audio 'stutter' is something to pursue particularly since it has now been seen on two different networks although since nothing significant has changed on the audio decoding side of things I'm fairly confident these are general network issues outside Playout itself. |
2. OAS Playout v2.0, Beta 5, 23/02/03
(In between this webcast and the April one, a 4 hour "Image special" was put together from the Image Communications centre at Luton, UK - read all about it here)
Shoutcast streamed out on a Sunday evening, this release is intended to be very close to the finished V2.0 product.
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Duration: 120 minutes, split as 60min from here & 60min from "Image studios, Luton" 1st Hour: No technical issues & everything went very smoothly. Having listened to the end result I am pleased with pretty much all the aspects of the trial (including my ability to set reasonable & consistent output levels). Dynamic track updates into Shoutcast servers has been available since Beta4 & this along with the cluster we put together held up with no problems. 2nd Hour: This was a bit of an experiment whereby the show was produced from a non-local studio (Luton) & relayed into a private Shoutcast server here. The resultant audio stream was then looped back round to be re-encoded into the main cluster. Unfortunatly either due to heavy Internet traffic or other network related issues the in-bound stream proved non too reliable with frequent hiccups & drop outs. OAS Playout was also running on the same hardware setup as the recent ImageFM broadcast and suffered from some of the problems we experienced then, including at least one fatal crash (although this was playing a known corrupted mp3). With the hardware/software platform stability still in doubt from the previous broadcast I am not too concerned with the problems encountered in the second hour - the program crash induced by a corrupt mp3 file I am non-too worried about although it would be good to proof the program better against this sort of thing - although a post broadcast attempt to mangle & playback an mp3 file resulted in the system capably dealing with it. The 'eternally repeating jingle' effect (seen during the Image broadcast & repeated once here) didn't occur so hopefully the fix I applied has seen the last of that. |
1. OAS Playout v2.0, Beta 2, 23/10/02
This was the first trial put out onto the web via Shoutcast:
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Duration: ~80 minutes, although total output was in the order of 2.5hrs mostly of back to back music sequenced from OAS Playout as the Shoutcast servers were put together. Summary: Technically there were no issues arising, probably the 'tightest' show to date. Again, the new audio core (xaudio replacement) is proving as robust as XAudio in these trials but possibly most significant is the spurious startup delay which has been haunting the software since day one looks finally dead and buried (see V1 trials) and this is without the need to implement the 'pre-load' feature I'd been considering. There were also no odd sound effects or other artifacts cropping up. The only remaining effect is the small burst you can get when seeking tracks on the main player but this has been confirmed as a DirectX anomly and had certainly been fixed in DX8.1 under Win98 (strangely not under Win2k). There remains a few textual 'quirks' in track selection from the Load dialog but these are minor - all in all then the best yet. Other Issues: Aside from the s/w performing, this was also the first trial using new hardware (a complete systems change from a P266 to 1.4Ghz Athlon - significantly the sound card pairing - two PCI Soundblaster cards (Live + PCI128). Installation was a nightmare and there was a noticeable quality drop when playing from the PCI128 card - this appears to be down to using the original Microsoft driver instead of a Creative one but I need to do some further tests on this. This was also the first show to be streamed via Shoutcast onto the web - this also proved to go fairly smoothly once everyone had opened up the correct ports. From my primary server, we had 2 backup relay servers giving a total user compliment of ~10 listeners @64kbs - I also put out two streams of 22kbs for dial up connections. Listener peak was around 7 connections to the cluster. |