Richard,
There is a "now playing" plugin which (amongst other useful features) saves a text file to a location of your choice.
https://www.playitsoftware.com/Plugins/View/NowPlaying
With this text file an external streaming programme (for example B.U.T.T.) can take the text and use the metadata.
My top recommendation for streaming encoders is (the paid version of) Rocket Broadcaster.
https://www.rocketbroadcaster.com/
Give the free version a go and you will find you want the paid features !
One other thought Richard, is this the distribution feed (in which case 128kb/s is a sensible choice) or a contribution feed which goes through some kind of "continuity mixer" and a second encoder ?
If a contribution feed I would use a much higher bitrate if possible (say 320kb/s).
Hi, Mark, and thanks for the observations.
Yep, this is the distro feed. We have several presenters around the world and they drive the server directly at the stream rate of 128kb/s and mp3 encoding.
The combination of the "Now Playing" plugin and Rocket Broadcaster paid version has come up a number of times now and appears to be the way to go. I've been in touch with them on this and they kindly sent a config tutorial.
However it turns out we were not running the latest version of the Internet Broadcast plugin so we need to check that to see if we need to do anything at all!
Many thanks for your help.
R
That's an interesting idea, but you would think that BUTT would be similarly affected if so.
It doesn't sound like a sample rate issue - I would expect ticks and pops at regular intervals or pitch errors - but it's easy to check with the Focusrite Device Settings panel (as the 2i2 is the only device doing any digitising).
Thanks for the thought!
R
Richard Elen
My colleague is using PlayIt Live with the Internet Broadcasting plugin to stream some of our programming at 128kbps mp3 16-bit 44.1kHz.
Monitoring the stream (Icecast2) I noticed that there was a "fuzzy" quality to the sound that, while most noticeable on speech, is also present on music.
This renders the plugin unusable.
Monitoring the stream on headphones it appears as if distorted artefacts are appearing on both sides of the stereo.
To identify the source of the problem we hooked up her standard broadcasting setup (hardware mixer feeding a Scarlett 2i2 USB audio interface) to BUTT and tried that. The audio on the stream was now clean as a whistle.
As a result of these tests, it appears we have a problem with the Internet Broadcasting plugin.
Alternatively, can anyone recommend a third-party encoder that will get Now Playing metadata to display correctly to listeners? BUTT for Windows does not appear to support this feature which makes it unusable for music programming.
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions.