very useful

Dead air is a broadcaster's worst nightmare! I carry a live show on my station in which I relay a stream. When PlayIt Live has an error that prevents it from playing the stream, I have dead air until the next fixed time marker (usually the hard time marker at the top of the next hour). What if as soon as the silence was detected, it reverted to the playout pattern or the designated backup clock. Better yet, add a program code so if the program couldn't relay the stream for some reason or another, try it twice more within seconds, then revert to the playout pattern or backup clock. It would take intense coding and might destabilize the program, but there is a possibility that upon the first failed attempt at relaying an internet stream, that the program revert to the backup plan (playout pattern or designated clock), while in the background continuing to attempt to connect to the internet stream that it was scheduled to relay until the next fixed timer. Then if the connection was reestablished, it would segue from the currently playing song to the stream. Maybe I overthought this :-)

If this can be incorporated it would be a great feature. I've had two instances now of a live URL not being picked up and getting dead air instead of defaulting to the playout pattern. Not just to send an email, but an option to 'resume'; or whatever, and make sure something is playing ? Yes, I realise that kills the ability to send an email when there is audio playing, but as an option...?

A further need for this feature - I recently had a couple of audio files sent that were full radio shows, a one hour and a two hour show form different people. Sadly, they don't play out in PiL. The display shows the file is running, the timer counts down, but there is no audio and the graphic display for the audio next to the cart stays empty. A classic example of needing a silence detector please...

Once again I've had a 'show' sent that played out with no audio. Dead air. I'm not able to listen 24/7 so missed it's first play earlier in the week. It repeated today and I caught it and skipped over to the default playlist. I have also been made aware of a live show we carry that failed to play this week and we had dead air as they had changed the URL and what they gave me did not work :-(

I like this concept. A thought might be to include this feature with PlayIt Recorder. The recorder is already listening to the audio, so adding a built-in module for dead-air detection and notification would be a great selling point. Also, having it separate from PlayIt Live would be beneficial in the cases where PlayIt Live locks up.

there is a freeware program called "Pira CZ Silence Detector" that basically does this. handy to have installed on a seperate machine if you use a second PC to manage the online streaming. The problem is if the same feature is integrated within PlayIt Live, surely if the core program crashes, so does the silence detector. This would be better used bespoke or as a plugin on recorder with perhaps the added purpose of playing something from a looped pre-recorded file or something on a small database that randomly throws in track, ident, track, ident & squirts it down the output until the main playout is resumed.

would make a big difference

Had yet another variation on a remote URL being silent, this time PlayIt showed 'BUFFERING' in the active player and we had silence on air for over an hour before it was noticed. I've seen the note about Pira CZ Silence Detector and have used this on a Community station in the past where we had a network and spare PC's to enable it to be used. It's not really an option here as I don't have the means of restarting audio without rebooting the failed PC, which then trips the remote server and we still lose output.

would be great

Would be nice function - though at the moment I use pira cz on the same machine as play it - setup to email then reboot if there is more than 30 seconds of silence. I use azuracast as my streaming server - so once the feed drops it takes over so - I never really get more than 30 - 40 seconds of silence - if it’s a internet dropout there is no silence azuracast picks this up straight away.

I use Pira CZ Silence Detector for this and the benefit of not having it part of the application is it monitors the application independently.

Using Pira CZ or RTV Silence Detection software is an alright workaround, but having this feature directly in PlayIt Recorder I think would be ideal. For me I don't want to monitor an audio device all the time, only when it's being recorded in PlayIt Recorder. So not having to re-schedule my watch times in another program would be nice.

Great idea, but have recorder show timestamps for when it occurred for diagnostics and editing.

Pira CZ works well until this feature is added

I would rather it sent a text message because I can go days with looking at email. Just add your phone number.