I discovered today that this morning, the program Salamandra had just stopped playing. It didn't crash, and I was able to just play the next track and it started working again. Prior to this, it had run for days with no issues.
I was wondering if anyone else using the program has seen this behavior. There may have been something wrong with the audio file, but I just don't know. I'll be checking that out when I'm wider awake (it's late Monday here on the Wet Coast).
I have been using Salamandra on auto pilot since my post that I had switched a few weeks ago or more and ditched Zara and it has been working without a glitch. Programmed events work perfect.
But what you are saying happened with Zara a couple of times. It was caused by a defective track corrupted in some way. With Zara you could find the track by looking where the time is on the right and instead of the time there was a icon like this ..... + ..... something along those lines, I can't reproduce it exactly. I checked track lists quickly for those symbols to know to delete that one or download again from a different source.
I don't know how a corrupted track would display with Salamandra.
Only other thing is your computer froze momentarily or something. I use a separate computer for this that is never connected to internet and nothing installed like antivirus that wants to update.
The file looks OK - the headers were validated and I ran it successfully through a converter program so the data is fine.
One thing I did notice is that it was a very low bitrate - 61kbps mono (the way I found it). I'm wondering if somehow Salamandra got messed up with that.
All my files have run properly on Zara for months - this is the first time anything like this has happened. I doubt very much it was something else happening with the computer. There's nothing much going on except Edcast (which generates the stream). Nothing had connected to the computer (I check it out [almost] daily with Remote Desktop). Salamandra had just stopped and it's been playing since I just started playing the next track.
I'll keep a closer eye on it now.
@artisan-radio When that icon appeared with Zara the track played back fine but for some reason Zara didn't like it. But if Zara tried to play it it froze or acted erratically. Weird.
Out of 1000s one or two weren't good. Don't think the bitrate had anything to do with it although most bitrates are standard 32, 64, 128, 196, 256 etc. 61 seems like an odd uncommon bitrate. Maybe that could have had something to do with it. Try replacing the offending track?
There is a Salamandra forum on Facebook.
I suspect that the actual bitrate as VBR with a certain quality level - that 61kbps was probably just the first block or buffer or whatever.
I just took the track out and will replace at some point. I've had mp3's play fine, but headers are bad (found with a program called mp3val), there's bad data (often found when you attempt to run it through a converter), etc.
As I said, never had any issues with Zara and this behavior. I'll keep a closer eye out on Salamandra - got a bit complacent as it was running so smoothly for weeks.
Thants a strange one, I have never had that happen all the time I have been running Salamandra. Did the log have anything in it when it happened. I would post it in the Salamanda Facebook page and see if it has happened to anyone else.
No, nothing in the log. The song that was playing was there (at 8:45) and then the next thing in the log was the song I started up later. The player just appeared to stop.
Thanks for posting at Facebook, as I don't use it.
@artisan-radio I just figured out your Salamandra issue!
At the top of the playlist there is 5 selections...default, repeat, random, manual, shuffle.
This selects how you want the playback to work. One of those settings, either default or manual....most likely default, will play the playlist in order and then stop when it runs through the whole thing. This is what happened after a few weeks most likely. Set the playlist on repeat(I have it there) where if it's like Zara it will play it in order and start again. Or you can set on shuffle where it will playback and shuffle and start again. Every once in a while shuffle the playlist by going to the settings at the top and select playlist and move down the drop down window and second from the bottom you'll see shuffle playlist. You can do that while it's playing with no effect to change the playback order.
No, that's not it. It's set up properly for repeat.