[grc] Trouble with Winamp

[Susan Raybuck]

I highly recommend you do not use Winamp.
In our experience, there is no way to schedule or order your content in it.
No matter what you do to load the shows in order, Winamp randomizes them. 

We devoted a lot of expertise and man-hours to the problem. We now are using New Wave which came free when we bought our Arrakis Arc-8. Not that it is great or trouble-free. But as an interim solution it was relatively fast and easy to get into. We wanted to go the Rivendell route and bought a good system with it preloaded, but the program director decided ultimately that programming it from scratch was going to take more weeks and hours than we felt we had to get it up and going, build a decent product and listening audience, and be able to bring in underwriting and community support. As a new community radio station with very few with any previous radio experience or in Linux programming, we didn’t have the human resources to make Rivendell a good choice at the time.

Susan Raybuck
Community News Director
KWVH-LP 94.1 FM Wimberley Valley Radio
Wimberley, Texas

Listen online on wimberleyvalleyradio.org <http://wimberleyvalleyradio.org/>


On May 10, 2017, at 4:31 PM, al davis via grc <grc at maillist.peak.org> wrote:

On Wed, 10 May 2017 13:26:28 -0700
Ellen Stewart via grc <grc at maillist.peak.org> wrote:
> ..... Often, when
> programmers arrive, Winamp is frozen. We usually can reboot and get
> it started, but it seems to be freezing more and more often and at
> present, will not allow CDs and the mic to play through it.
> 
> Do we need to abandon Winamp for a more stable system? What system
> would that be? Is Rivendell a good option? What are the pluses and
> minuses?

Yes, Rivendell is a good option.

In general, if you are having trouble with computers freezing
requiring a reboot, it's usually a hardware problem.

It might be a bad hard drive.  Just one bad bit can cause a problem
like this.  It might be overheating.  It might have a bad fan that is
runnning slow, or maybe there is dust on the CPU heat sink that is
making it run hotter than it should.

You say "very low budget" .. is this a donated computer?

Sometimes wiping it clean (both in a hardware and software sense) and
reinstalling fixes the problem, sometimes it doesn't.  Sometimes seems
to fix the problem, but really it defers the problem until you can do
something better. Sometimes trying to reinstall shows off how bad the
computer is, by failing during install.

As Michi sez ....  at the Grassroots Radio Conference, there are
sessions on things like Rivendell, and even how to make the best of
not-so-great equipment.  This year it will be in Albany, NY, Sep 29 -
Oct 2, hosted by WCAA-LP.
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