Listening this morning 9/18. KCSM 9/18/20 06:00 Microsoft Edge latest version Version 85.0.564.51 (Official build) (64-bit) / Windows 10 version 2004 up to date.
I can hear a minor disruption to playback every 5 minutes. I think you are aware of this. Otherwise player seems to be working fine. The little ARK logo/player is cute. Not sure listeners will know what it is.
I have various suggestions or questions - I will send each in separate reply
Is there a way to EXCLUDE certain shows from the Archives? WOWD has blocks of time where we play a random/shuffle selection of music from our Music Library and while we list those as shows on our Spinitron schedule (e.g., “WOWD Overnight” or “WOWD Music Library”) we really don’t want or need those to be archived.
Strongly suggest you replace the ARK> with a simple and solid PLAY ARROW … As it is, the 3 letters are just too tiny and the play arrow is hard to see. Find another place to put the “ARK” branding – e.g., the actual play widget needs some explanatory words anyway - it’s not self-explanatory … so right above or below it, write something like: LISTEN TO RECENT EPISODES ON THE “ARK” PLAYER …
But below, where you list RECENT shows, a simple PLAY ARROW (preferably SOLID, not just an outlined arrow) suffices - visitor to the web page will know that the PLAY ARROW signifies “click here if you want to play this episode”)
Ark seems to stop dead in its tracks when I navigate away from the page on which the Ark widget appears. Hopefully, there is a way to fix that either on your end or on our end! Please advise. This is high priority issue for us. We went to a lot of trouble with our prior archives to ensure the archive episode selected by the listener continued to play even if the listener navigated to a different page within our website. Help! Thanks!
This is great and thanks for all the quick work! It’s great to see this finally integrated in such a slick way I was testing it out on the WOWD site and seem to be getting HTTP 403 errors from the streaming URLs about 50% of the time.
We’ve only got audio for WOWD beginning Wednesday 16th about 7pm. If you try to play an older segment, it won’t work. The software just assumes that the full two weeks is there, which, in the case of WOWD, will become more true over the next 10 days, assuming the above deal-breaker doesn’t.
Thanks Tom. I had thought I was browsing the schedule from earlier today, but didn’t realize it was last Tuesday. Also, I’ll chat with Steve about the request he mentioned and run him through why it’s likely not possible or something that would be on Spinitron to do.
Sorry my deal-breaker language was too harsh, I edited that out.
It was different from RFA because (as I understand it) the archives link on our home page opened up a separate window (from RFA’s website).
It was also different back in the old Spinitron v. 1 days when we used our own, home-grown, custom-made archive. But my IT expert told me that took a lot of extra IT work on our part.
I’ve seen some station websites where the archive player is a pop-up that remains there even as you navigate to other pages. (I believe I have, anyway).
So if there’s no feasible way to have that web player pop on every page with a station’s website, I guess we’ll just have to deal with it.
We can try using a pop-up window. It’s the only simple way to separate the player from browsing in the rest of the page. I hesitate to use pop-ups because I thought browsers pretty much ban them these days.
That’s not really the plan. For now we simply copy the audio data from your webcast. So an archive’s bit rate will be the same as webcast it’s made from.
We will be able to support more flexibility than this if there is demand for it.
Believe it or not, you aren’t the first to ask for that. The problem is that the archived stream you listen to must be non-interactive or the entire service including the live stream fails to qualify for the statutory webcast service. Seeking or skipping around in the archive stream is obviously interactive.
But we have something else in progress that I think will likely satisfy listeners more than a seek/skip interaction but we need to make progress on some other things before we introduce it.
I was testing it out on the WOWD site and seem to be getting HTTP 403 errors from the streaming URLs about 50% of the time.