Ark player feedback

[tom]

You can pause the player and skip forwards half an hour.

[JoeJeff]

Thank you for the Ark Player I can listen to my favorite djs when Pardon My French is playing “music” better suited to a warehouse full of drugged out euro-wanna be’s I think it works fine

[WNMC_Eric]

ARK seems to be on EST, while we are now on EDT, as a result the recordings that are supposed to be from my 8-10 pm show actually cover 7-9pm. Can this be fixed easily?

[tom]

Hi Eric,

Can you give me the URL for a page where I can reproduce the problem.

And to confirm what you mean. A player that’s set to start a 8am (it displays 8am), when you play it, plays audio that was on the radio at 7am?

[ultramusicman]

• Do you like the Ark player? / Yes

• What’s good about it? / It exists

• What’s less good? / control; there is no way to start at a specific time that isn’t every 15 minutes.

• What’s broken? / Nothing as far as I can see.

• What’s missing? / I would find a backup 10 seconds button quite helpful. Being able to type in a specific time rather than being limited to every 15 minutes I would find quite beneficial.

• What you were listening to? Station, date, time / WMUH - Thought Radio™, 8/19/2023, 6-8am

• What browser? Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, … / Chrome

• Is it up to date or do you know its version? / up to date

• Computer or device, e.g. PC, iPhone SE, Amazon Fire HD, Macbook Air, … / Maci Mini with M2 chip

• Is its system software up to date or do you know the version? e.g. Windows 8.1, iOS 12, Android 9 / Ventura 13.2.1

[tom]

Hi Bill, thanks for joining the forum.

I love your Q/A. Very encouraging that we achieved some compatibility. The limited interactivity is mentioned here.

[ultramusicman]

If I paused the player, it used to pick up where I left off when I subsequently pressed play even if days had elapsed. I liked that. Now, it always restarts at the beginning which isn’t to my liking. Please consider returning to the old method of operation. Thanks.

[tom]

We haven’t changed that software so I don’t know how to explain the change you experienced.

[hearvox]

@ ultramusicman Ark Player works as it always has for us (KGLT): when you pause then play, it picks up playing from where it stopped.

[DankDank]

I love that spintron exists and that I can catch up on my favorite shows on wqsv!

Would it be possible to either open the stream and navigation in a separate window once its playing, or open all links on the spintron page in a new tab? I was streaming and clicked on calendar, not realizing it would load the new page in the same tab, interrupting the stream and causing me to have start over.

Also, it would be awesome if one could navigate with a slider, rather than having to use a drop down that only lets one start in 15 minute increments. I hate not being able to jump back or forward a few seconds or minutes.

Thanks for your hard work on developing this! I hope you find my suggestions helpful.

[tom]

Hi Daniel, thanks for joining the forum.

It is possible to open a pop-up window with a player in it in desktop/laptop web browsers, but not on mobile, which is the majority of listening. Possible but I don’t like to do that and I don’t like it when web sites do it to me. I can open a link in a new window or in a new tab on my own so if I want I can leave a player running. If a player is already running and I want to click a link on the page with the player, I open it in a new tab or window and the player keeps running. In summary: I don’t like popups; we don’t need them; I don’t want to inflict them on users.

On the question of limited interactivity, please read the following

Webcast archive, not podcast

Some radio listeners, DJs, and station staff have told us about features they expect in Spinitron’s Ark webcast archive service, features like skip, seek, and segmenting the stream into radio programs. It’s as though they expect the archive to be like a podcast player. But our service doesn’t work like that. This article explains why and what it does instead. Podcasts In the podcast model of user interaction, you choose a radio program that aired some time ago, start it, and listen to an audio…

[Ryu]

Hello, apologies if this has already been addressed.

Might it be possible to add a “live / current” time stamp to the functionality?

As it currently exists, the time stamps don’t align with the “Now Playing” in the Spinitron lineup, so I often find myself having to exit Spinitron and navigating directly to the various station websites. There is also a minor issue for me, with the radio session starting from the very beginning if the page reloads or exists (and no way to get back to my previous location).

Appreciate your work, it’s a wonderful site.

[jcpux]

It would be sweet to be able to share a link of a specific date/time. It could be a button in the player when you are setting the date/time (mocked up with a hover state), and the link could be run by some URL params.

[eva]

Totally agree, it would be sweet! Unfortunately, that feature would also render the Ark interactive, which is not permitted by law .

[ultramusicman]

It sure would be nice to manually place the play head anywhere in the interior of the recording. Thanks for listening.

[ultramusicman]

I’m trying to play the February 10, 2024 episode at Thought Radio™ Sat Feb 10 with Bill Fox on 91.7 FM WMUH - Allentown but it seems to start near the end of the show during one of the two Scott Henderson tracks. Please look into where the bulk of the show is hiding. Thanks.

[ultramusicman]

Yes, since there is no way to advance the timeline, I let it play and it is indeed near the end of the S.H. track. Where is the bulk of the show?

[tom]

The archive works by connecting to the live stream and making a copy of that. So when the live stream is not available, there are gaps in the recording. Our logs show quite a lot of outages in the connection to WMUH’s live stream. This is usually a consequence of problems at the stream server. The outages are visible here.

[ultramusicman]

Hi Tom,

Thank you for the link. The graph sheds a lot of light on things. Out of curiosity:

1. If WMUH keeps a backup of what went out over the air (prestream of course), would you be able to use that in order to repair gaps in the station’s stream?
2. How does the level of outages on WMUH’s stream compare to other college radio streams? IMO, more than one minute per year might be barely acceptable but that’s just me spitballing.

Thanks,

Bill

[tom]

Hi Bill,

Spinitron’s archive service is designed to be very low cost and fully automatic. It does not offer a way for client stations to patch or otherwise edit the recordings.

Some stations have very reliable streams. But engineering stream reliability depends on what’s causing outages, which varies a lot. A common issue is that stream encoders are unreliable in software, hardware, power supplies and network connections. Another is the network connectivity between the encoder and the stream server, which in some situations is hard to make reliable.

So I don’t want to make a statistical comparison because not all station’s situations are comparable.