OK, since I don’t think that last payphone call worked and because I’d rather be anywhere but at home, I am at the coffee shop, reprising what I attempted to report earlier. I seem to have finally achieved the success I thought I had reached a few days ago, with regard to getting a radio platform to work. I gave up on Centova Cast after countless obscure permission and “file not found” errors for which I could find no explanation. I think what made me go with it over WHM Sonic was the fact that the latter is tied up into WHM (cPanel) while Centova was not. But hey, who cares, right? When WHMSonic installs in a few seconds and Centova takes 10-15 minutes that really shouldn’t be a deciding factor, right, since you typically only install things once. But I ended up installing and reinstalling Centova, fixing permissions errors, manually creating config files… I had the trial version for 30 days, after which I quit using itTwo weeks after it should have expired I saw the port 2199 URL show up on autocomplete, and found that the trial period either never ends or the software takes its sweet time in polling the registration server and nuking the functionality. Maybe I could have used the trial version forever, I don’t know, but I don’t play those kind of games so I uninstalled the trial and reinstalled, this time purchasing a license for 1 month at $11. Having installed and had some modicum of luck in getting the trial version to work I foolishly figured I could do so again easily with the paid version.
Troubles enough (for me, that is, maybe not for others) came when I had to REBOOT THE WEB SERVER to finish uninstalling the trial version. This would have interrupted access for the thousands of people who happened to have found one of my sites through the CBS Sunday Morning piece I did last year. So I winged it, and did not reboot the server before installing the licensed version of Centova. As I should have guessed, vestiges of the trial version appeared in this new version, with “Last Played” tracks showing up even though they should have been deleted altogether. I also saw no end of mysterious “albums” even though I had uploaded 15 audio tracks from my voice recorder. Files are all named like timestamps, something like 2018_02_09_18_12_23, which Centova’s (or Shoutcast’s, doesn’t matter which) ID3 reader liberally translated into some random string of numbers bearing no resemblance to the above pattern. I got a bunch of tracks into the “Heavy Rotation” playlist but found no way to get the AutoDJ (which was enabled) to pick them up. Then I saw something about how I had to purchase an MP3 license key, something I had no memory of from the trial version.
The beat goes on. If, when it comes to this kind of software, I don’t necessarily connect to the “Playlist” and “Heavy Rotation” type lingo it’s because I’m not really doing the kind of radio most people seem to do. Everybody wants to be like everybody else with this stuff but I’m trying some things the likes of which I have not found out there, though I will be surprised if everything I’m attempting is unique or close to it. I mean the walking and talking thing, that’s nothing new, and I don’t do it especially well at least on technical merits and handling of the audio gear. But the shower stuff might be new, and certain of the payphone sounds are almost certainly unique for nothing else except that they originated from actual public pay telephones.
So today I find myself with two things I’ve wanted for months. A working Shoutcast platform and, as of last week, a pair of Bluetooth headphones that actually work. I don’t know what anti-Bluetooth aromatics I emit but BT has almost always been a fail for me. I got this particular set of headphones so I would be able to play through my hours and hours of audio without always being tethered to the desk. But even that proves bothersome at times, when I hear something I have to edit out and I am in the other room.
Alright, then, enough shoptalk. Going to keep at this radio thing. Is Shoutcast considered primitive? Maybe, by some standards, but so many people use it… and it’s what I’m used to, or at least it’s the radio cast product I’ve known for a long enough time.
