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PlayIt Live disconnects from net

I’m new to this. I used the plug-in inside the program to connect to my service which then connects to ShoutCast. Everything, for the most part works fine and sounds great. Here’s the issue- from time to time (random) the program will just disconnect from the Internet. The program itself is still running, the plug-in says it’s still streaming, the green “On Air” is still lit but it is not streaming. I have to manually tell the plug-in to disconnect, then re-connect, and everything is fine till the next time. The problem is I’m losing time, and I’m sure listeners, when they find dead air. Winamp and their plug-in does not have this issue at all.
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Additional- After I wrote the above it died again. I heard it. The audio got real quiet- then it went off all together. I shut the program down and restarted. After the restart it’s running fine. I’m thinking the program leaks memory... If that’s the case it’ll need a restart every other day. Thanks! Gerry

Hello Gerry,


From my experience, on a LAN at least, PlayIt Live is extremely stable including the streaming plug in.


I have a couple of test setups which I run for experimental purposes to (in this case Icecast) servers based on Raspberry Pi's. Assuming I don't let Windows updates happen, the Windows 10 machine will run for weeks.


The Windows 7 machine has a slightly dodgy sound card driver so will typically only go for a few days.


For what it's worth, I've had loads of driver problems with sound cards and Windows 10.


I might look there first.


If you have a mixer then you could also run a second streaming program (B.U.T.T for example) for comparison. 


I've also had the trial version of Rocket Broadcaster running and that is good. If I were running a 24x7 "public" service I might look at the paid version of that on a dedicated machine or B.U.T.T. on an old Mac.


For completeness, I also have "Dark Ice" running on one of the Raspberry Pi's and that has been running for 2 weeks without interruption. 


I followed the excellent instructions at:


https://omara.li/broadcasting-with-raspberry-pi/



Mark, Thank you, first of all. Everything you are saying I am reading closely with great interest. 1. I am on SoundCast, not Ice... 2. Right now I am using Win 7. I don’t like the crappy sound in the Dell so I am running a Soundblaster (one of my favorites) plugged into a USB port. This is to say it is external- plugged into the front USB ports. The live station itself (mixers, etc) plugs directly into the Soundblaster, and although the PlayIt Life Program is “inside the computer” it uses the Soundblaster also. All the settings are directed to it. Today I am approaching 24 hours on the air, no hiccup. Yesterday, early, it left the air on me. 3x. 3x in one day! I’m trying to build a pro-sounding station and you can’t do that with dead-air. Actually- a bit of paranoia is setting in here! LOL! I have turned off the Win updates (at least is says they’re off- Win may be lying?) and I turned off the virus scanner updates. I have them set on manual. When the station goes down the only way to recover is to completely shut the program off. Wait 15-20 seconds. Turn the program back on and it will auto restart and pick up right where it left off. Thoughts? It has 2 gig RAM and a 250 gig hard drive. Dell 320s desktop. I am adding another 2 RAM tonight that I bought. I don’t see how more RAM can help but make things better?


Hello Gerry,


Assuming I found the correct machine, the Windows 7 Dell Optipex 745 I use is similar in specs to your 320.


As you "loop" your audio via a mixer there will be no problems running B.U.T.T. and the PlayIt Live streamer at the same time. Just select the Soundblaster as a source to both programs.


I had trouble finding a Windows 7 sound card driver for the built in hardware on my Optiplex and ended up forcing the XP driver to install.


I use 32 bit Windows 7 with 4GB of RAM (which results in 2.99GB usable). PlayIt Live takes about 20%-25% CPU and that's all I have running.


As a bit of a test, you could feed the built in sound card input with a second mixer output and use that as a stream source for PlayIt Live and the Sound Blaster to B.U.T.T. and run them in parallel.


 

My solution was to add another product, Rocket Broadcaster to provide the encoder services. It plays nice with PlayIt Live! Now I’m trying to get the metadata to work. I bought the module but it seems it isn’t sending data to the file I specified. The encoder has been running days now, by the way, and not one glitch so far... Let me know how you think the station sounds- WAAYradio.com. I bought the PlayIt audio processing and I have had several folks I know in radio who say the audio is exceptional.
Hello Gerry, I like Rocket Broadcaster and it runs OK on the same machine as PlayIt Live. As I recall the free version doesn’t use track metadata, that requires the paid version which I haven’t tried. B.U.T.T. will also work fine on the same machine as PlayIt Live and can take the track metadata. It doesn’t have all the features of Rocket Broadcaster (which I consider ticks all the boxes) but might be worth a look.
It was a strange thing with the metadata. It acted like it wasn’t going to work, and about an hour after I started it kicked in and has been running since. I have PlayIt Live feeding the metadata to a file on my computer. Rocket also has access to that file. It picks up the entry and moves it forward to ShoutCast! So it’s an exchange of text. Some day I’d like to see album names added but I’m happy with name and song for now.
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