Libretime: Allow starting and stopping of playout

[kmahelona]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
One feature our radio announcers have been asking me for over the last 4 years is the ability to pause or start/stop the airtime playout. We don't actually use a DJ programme like Mixx; instead, our announcers work straight from Airtime(LibreTime). We've learnt to work around not having this feature but if there are others out there who think this would be valuable, then maybe it's worth investigating. This would bring LibreTime more in line with traditional radio automation software.

Describe the solution you'd like
The "easy" part here is simply stopping and starting playout, but the challenge is what to do with the rest of the schedule for your show. The other hard part is building the UI for this and how that would fit in with the current UI. One option is having a big play/pause button at the top. Another is the ability to schedule in pauses, though it makes more sense to schedule in a backing track to avoid the risk of having dead air.

What the user really wants though is to start a song at the end of their voice break and they can usually time the end of a song on when to come in. In that case, they may what to tick a spot in the playout list where they want playout to pause automatically and then resume from that spot once they hit play.

But before going into too much detail I'm keen to hear what others think of this feature in general.

Describe alternatives you've considered
One thing we've talked about doing instead is programming in instrumentals which signal a voice break for our announcers. Good in theory but in practice... ;). You could also schedule a silent file for a fixed length, again good in theory...

[paddatrapper]

This would be useful to us too.

Potentially LibreTime could have a 'Live On-Air' UI page which acts more like traditional on-air systems. This can then be scheduled in a show as a live show or just a show with no content (like how a show mount is currently handled). This would allow presenters to use the library of music/media already available in LibreTime without stations needing to maintain the same database for live automation and LibreTime.

[zklosko]

Just adding my two cents. This comes from the feature request I opened before @Robbt redirected me.

Describe the solution you'd like
Big dollar radio automation packages often have a live assist mode, which allows hosts to have the system pause between two tracks to allow them to talk on air (called a chain stop) and then to press play and have the sequence continue. This could be accomplished by adding two buttons to the bottom of the Scheduled Shows pane: Stop after track and Play/resume. Stop after track would somehow tell Liquidsoap to stop playback of the queue after it finished playing the current track and Play/resume would resume playback of the queue. There could be a mechanism to add a marker entry to the queue but that might be too much; instead have the Stop after track button blink or have a banner at the top of the screen, similar to the "Your next show is empty..." banner.

There's no need to add audio carts, just a simple stop/go control for DJs at LP stations who use LibreTime for their shows in studio. (If audio carts are to be added in the future, we should perhaps consider adding a new page entirely, one that DJs can open in a new window that would have all the tools they would need to do their show live without the possibility of messing up the playlist. See the Webcaster client.)

Additional context
I don't have any sketches to upload, sorry. I do think that the section under the Scheduled Shows pane should be doubled in size, roughly the height of 1.5 track items listed in the pane, in order to accommodate fatter fingers on a touchscreen. There should also be an option on the main interface to hide said buttons, since not all stations/shows may need the use of them.

[zklosko]

I was talking with the people from Liquidsoap about this on Slack. This is what they mentioned:

• I think the best for that is a switch with custom condition. Something along these lines (see below) and then could control when the source plays by setting should_play to true or false. You can even skip the current track using source.skip when you switch to false so that it resumes with a new track, if needed.

should_play = ref true
s = switch([({!should_play}, s)])

• You can probably receive [these commands] via the HTTP harbor server

[zklosko]

I found another clue:

stripped_stream = 
  strip_blank(input.http("http://myicecast:8080/live.ogg"))
fallback(track_sensitive=false,
         [stripped_stream,skip_blank(normal)])

"Without the track_sensitive=false the fallback would wait the end of a track to switch to the live. When using the blank detection operators, make sure to fine-tune their threshold and length (float) parameters." from https://www.liquidsoap.info/doc-1.4.2/cookbook.html

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