• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

SS32 Audio Drop Out

J

just browsing

Guest
We use the SS32 automation and have began to encounter a problem with dropping audio. This is an intermittent issue but still worrysome.

What I mean by dropping audio is that for example Song A is playing and suddenly there is no audio on air. When I came into the studio the automation was running just fine, showed over 2 minutes of the song remaining (and "playing")... yet silence on the air.

We investigated ensuring these particular files have properly marked EOM's... played them in the production studios to ensure they were not corrupted...

Like I said it is a hit and miss sort of problem, but I'm concerned its a sympton of a larger problem to come. Has anyone had a similar issue?
 
Funny, a jock called me up about similar issue a few days ago. I tuned in, and what it sounded like was a CD skipping noise every 4 seconds or so. Then, when the song ended, it skipped back 30ish seconds, and finished the song minus the skipping noise. As far as I know, this hasn't happened before and hasn't happened since.

Anyways, does this happen on various air channels or just one? Sounds like an audio card issue. Any patterns you noticed? Always on the same song, air channel, time of day/hour, etc?
 
It's been a few years since I have been hands-on with SS32, but I had a machine once that started exhibiting similar symptoms. Eventually the hard drive failed and we had to swap in one of the production machines.
 
To the OP... Definitely sounds like a failing hard drive. I would replace that ASAP.

Anytime I have ever had Automation 'pausing' over the years (save one software bug), it was a failing hard drive.

Hard drives are made so cheap these days. That is why I went to redundant file servers and access my audio over a private gigabit network. I have more faith in that 3Com switch than I do a hard drive. I do RAID5 in both of them with an LSI Card and WD Raptors.

On a side note, I have an experiment I have been running for 6 months or so. It is a station with local audio on a Samsung SSD. Working great so far. I don't know if I'm ready to recommend that config. I use SSD's for boot (Intel) in all systems, but this is the first time I have tried to store the libraries on one.
 
Check event viewer, you will likely find disk errors. Back it up and replace ASAP.

Also verify the songs are actually on the local drive and it is not trying to play them across the network.
 
special ed said:
Also verify the songs are actually on the local drive and it is not trying to play them across the network.
Click to expand...

There's nothing wrong with using a networked file server. I have such a setup with my web stream and I also worked at a station that used a networked file server.

R
 
Using the the SS32 "double-disk" feature can cause the SS32 to hang.
Double-disk allows the the SS32 to find locally missing carts on the server.
However!
In our experiance if there's any delay reading a file or even "listing a folder contents"
from the server, it will hang the SS32 until it decides the file is really not available, times out,
and moves on.
 
The problem with doubledisk is too many stations became ignorant of uploading problems, thus when the server went down they lost half their content. You should make sure the Merge missing reports are accurate and someone is clearing them up.

Playing audio across a network is not necessarily bad. Axia has proven that! But if there are problems, there will be dropouts. Wiring, Nics, bad hubs & switches were often the cause as well as software that windows did not like such as Netware would slow things down too much. Linux servers set up to impersonate a windows box would be fine.
 
I had a similar problem with SS32 and found that Windows XP had taken the AudioScience card for itself. I fixed it by plugging in a USB audio fob and letting XP have that for its audio card. This SS32 system is over 6 years old and I have no idea why all of a sudden this became a problem - but it did.
 
Double disk is a fine feature, in and of itself. Problem was, once one solitary audio file was addressed from dispatch...our local machines...NEVER LET GO of dispatch. So, if and when dispatch gets bumped, rebooted...expect your local on-air machine to behave unexpectedly.

We were pretty meticulous with the folder extensions and mappings, and doubledisk caused more headaches than it solved. We made the decision to do without it. SS32 is based on 13 to 15 year old architecture. I would move on to a more modern system, if at all possible.
 
Status
This thread has been closed due to inactivity. You can create a new thread to discuss this topic.
Back
Top Bottom