Posted by drewish on October 23, 2006 at 10:49pm
Here's some areas I'd like to see improved in the station module. They're not in any particular order and some are a bit pie in the sky. If people are interested in contributing code or money to get these done I'd love the help.
- More flexible archive - It should be able to record fraction-of-an-hour or multi-hour shows. I'd like to also have a max length setting so you could keep getting hour long recordings of a single show.
- Timezone support - Traditional broadcast stations don't really have to worry about timezones but web stream listeners may be anywhere. It'd be very helpful for a user's timezone settings to be honored and provide a mechanism for anonymous users to specify their timezone.
- Catalog module - We've got a catalog of all our albums in an Access database. It's a pain in the ass to update, hard to use, and it's not linked into the website. So when they create a play list, DJs have to retype the album and artists info. It'd be much nicer to just type in the album's catalog number and a track number. It'd also be handy for listeners who wanted to make requests. Update: I've gotten started on this in HEAD. Having jQuery installed by default makes this something I feel like I can finally take on.
- Amazon.com play list integration - How sweet would it be to allow listeners to click on the track listed in the play list and direct them to amazon.com where they can buy the album... and we can get a referral fee.
- Multi-week schedule - Some stations have a monthly schedule. The new schedule table schema makes this possible but the trick would be building the UI to view and edit the schedule and adding another page to view the month's schedule.
Make the program node optional - I'd really like to open it up so that the admin can select what type of nodes are scheduled. So, if they don't like the stock program node, they can create their own in CCK. This kind of leads into...Update: Everything but allowing you to select the node type has been added in HEAD.- Modular schedule - I've got some other projects that could use a web based schedule. Currently, DJs book our production room by the hour on a paper schedule. To find out if someone has got it reserved they have to either call down to the station or just show up and hope it's free. If the scheduled node isn't hard coded to be a program node, this could be just about anything.
- Install profile - Drupal's new install profile support would make it possible to build a radio station package that had audio, views, station modules setup by default. This would lower the initial setup bar significantly. Problems I see include: having to install the getID3 library, setting up cron, and installing StreamRipper.
What would you all like to see?
Comments
Playlist Module
I have been considering for about a year how to implement a functional playlist system. The goal is to have a playlist entry system that gets updated by the host on the fly. If this can be done, then the site could display the currently playing song real-time. There is also a bunch of other functionality which could be done with this information:
Also, we would need a way to switch input to come from our automation system when we are operating headless. Our automation, BSI Simian has a configurable dynamic HTML or XML page which will display the current song playing from it. The biggest obstacle, IMHO, is typographic errors. This is something worth considering with respect to purchase links or even album art display. Fortunately, there is already a web resource which deals with this: MusicBrainz. With MusicBrainz functionality added to either a playlist module or a catalog module, the amount of information which must be retained by the local db would be minimal. By pulling the related information in from the web, the related info about a particular play will always be as accurate as MusicBrainz.
With respect to a catalog module, I also could see this as a great asset. The key is to make getting adds into the db as simple and fast as possible. I have always hoped that any system we eventually use to create a catalog of our library will do a CDDB lookup. With thousands of CD's, building a library will be an undertaking.
Here is my ultimate workflow for the whole system:
I know this is ambitious, but as I mentioned, I have been thinking about this for a while.
playlist system
Hey all - for what it's worth, and while it's still early, I'm going to be building a system (not just for Drupal) that accomplishes some (though not all) of these things. It will draw upon a large database of music to enable DJs to program playlists streamed under the DMCA's song complement rules. I helped manage Live365 for 4 years, until leaving last summer to begin planning this new venture.
I'll be looking to raise a small (angel) round of funding beginning next month, and I'm already on the hunt for talented developers with a sincere passion for this sort of offering. I'd very much like to work with this crew to ensure that what I'm building "plays well" with the Drupal framework.
A better Live365 on Drupal!?!
Welcome aboard David (have we met before?) and thanks Drewish for starting this group. My primary interest to help facilitate/provide a music-centric distribution (pretty identical to what zirafa's talking about here - http://groups.drupal.org/node/1041). Already familiar with Live365, I've been struggling to figure out how to utilize a service like that to create great radio station sites like these:
http://www.kcrw.com/
http://www.woxy.com/
http://www.kexp.org/
As for all the other ideas/suggestions (at least the ones I understand), I think they're very much in-line with what I've been thinking and inquiring about:
* Pulling from an online music database (http://groups.drupal.org/node/1570)
* Import/export wikipedia info (http://groups.drupal.org/node/1596)
* Creating strutured article pages that could inlude links to radio, amazon/itunes, etc. (http://groups.drupal.org/node/1645)
I'd love to hear what others would like to get out of a group like this as well as ideas on how to get there (ie reverse-bounties, pre-sell solutions, or even NPR style fundraisers).
Thanks
Gus
Gus Austin
All of this will be Drupal 5.0 only
I've run into a few walls with Drupal 4.7 (mostly trying to break up the functionality into sub-modules that interact) and decided that it's silly to try to hack it in 4.7 when it'll be easy in 5.0. So, as of now all active development will be for Drupal 5.0 and the 4.7 version will go into maintence mode.