Auto DJ Gap

[RichardJ]

Hi All

I've a small issue, whilst tracks playing on the main playlist in auto dj seem to finish and start ok, when the stream swaps to our station ID's we are getting a gap sometimes of 3-4 seconds of dead air.

We are currently playing 2 tracks then an ident.

I have checked over the mp3s with the station idents and they seem fin.. no gaps at the beginning or the end. In fact the tracks start straight after the idents finish, the gap only appears at the beginning of the ident. As I'm pretty sure it's not someone at IR HQ changing a cd that's causing the gap, I've no idea why this is happening. Any ideas anyone?

Thanks
Richard

 

[Support]

Hi Richard,

We downloaded all of your station idents and checked them over in an audio editor and your are correct that there is no gaps of silence at the start nor the end of those files.

Have you checked every single one of your Mp3 files that you have uploaded to check there is no gaps of silence on them instead. Some encoders do add 2 seconds of silence at the start / end of files. But often this goes unnoticed as some media players often ignore this or do a very quick fade into the next track so the playback is seamless.

How are you checking your files, in an audio editor? What are you encoding them to Mp3 with? We are sure it has to be related to the files themselves as the control panel will not just add the gaps in.

We also noticed that you have Mp3's on varying different bitrates, we recommend that you encode all of these at the same bitrate as you have configured for your stream.

 

[RichardJ]

Hi - Thanks for the reply.

We are using Adobe Audition to check the files over. - still trying to figure out the issue, i counted a 4-second gap this morning between ident and track.

We are looking at our bit rate and will make sure they are the same, could this be causing the issue?

Many Thanks

 

[General Lighting]

nearly all players and playout software (unless this software is being played into analogue equipment such as a traditional broadcast mixer and subsequently being reencoded for TX) really do not work well with different bitrates; that the player software kept working at all is a credit to the developers and shows how much the technology has improved in just a decade.

In the mid to late 2000s I was heavily involved with an EDM station that would switch from automatic playout to live shows; which could be at any bitrate. This switchover regularly meant having to restart both server and client software; thankfully our listeners were from countries and cultures where they would have previously been used to hauling a "portable" Japanese Band II FM receiver to an otherwise inconvenient part of the building to listen in to a pirate broadcaster or huddled in a small outbuilding around a shortwave receiver so a bit of extra effort to listen to this good quality music (and a few seconds gap) was small potatoes. Nowadays folk expect the same listener experience (or better) than traditional linear radio; so gaps are always worth removing whenever possible.

 

[Support]

Hi - Thanks for the reply.

We are using Adobe Audition to check the files over. - still trying to figure out the issue, i counted a 4-second gap this morning between ident and track.

We are looking at our bit rate and will make sure they are the same, could this be causing the issue?

Many Thanks

Yes the bitrate changeovers could possibly be the issue. Our new HTML5 player works well with handling inconsistent bitrates but generally flash players do not and can have playback issues (such as glitching etc) on the file changeovers. So its worth having all the bitrates / samplerates / number of channels consistent across all of your files.