@tranglos

The radio station was 'Afterhours'. No problem playing this station with RadioSure (also Baas based).

OK, I have good news, kind-of. The previous release of ER does not crash in this way. It still won't play the station (in the case of CJFH, the server returns 200 OK, but also sends a redirection URL to the correct playlist file. Browsers handle this situation somehow, ER does not, yet).

But it is clear now that the crashes are caused by some change I've introduced in the last few days, so I will definitely be able to fix the problem. And the stations should eventually be playable.

The crashing bug has been fixed. I couldn't really let it go, so I installed Delphi on the laptop and found the problem. No other changes in this release, but ER should no longer crash/disappear on trying to play a station.

Download link in the top message:
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=25068.0;attach=54553


Tech note: the error would occur after ER downloaded and analyzed a playlist that appeared to be empty (no valid links to audio streams were found in the playlist). Now ER will no longer crash, but for some stations it still cannot read the playlists properly. The situation with CJFH is a good example: when ER asks for the playlist, the server responds with '200 OK' message, so the body of the response should contain the playlist. Turns out, the body contains a random html web page with a redirection URL (to the real playlist) embedded in a refresh directive. I've never been a web admin, but this is not right: the server's response code contradicts what the server actually does. It's like being told the light is green, when it is actually red. I'll try to handle such pathological cases later.

For now - and here's the reward for having read this far - there is a configuration setting that may let ER play more stations, including the dreaded CJFH and perhaps others that were causing the crashing problem before. Close ER and edit the configuration file (found under "Application Data/ethervane/ethervane radio"); the file is named "ethervaneradio-config.ini". In the file, find the line

SelfHandlePlaylists=True

and change it to

SelfHandlePlaylists=False

Save the file and restart ER. Now the BASS library will be handling all the playlists requests itself. Normally, ER downloads and parses all playlists, because according to the docs, BASS only supports m3u and pls formats. However, the docs appear to be inaccurate, and BASS supports other popular playlists formats as well, such as asx, so there may be no need for ER to do any handling of playlists directly.

No problem.  I'll get the latest.
I knew it would be fixed... just not this fast
Looking forward to your other additions to ER as it evolves.

Thanks - I love it.

But the CJFH test still isn't even after the config change to False.

This is to be expected. The server is really configured in an abnormal manner. Only browsers can handle such unusual cases, because a lot of programmer time is devoted to making sure every last website can be displayed, no matter how badly designed.

At least with ER handling playlists by itself, rather than handing them all off to the BASS library, I can tweak the code so that more stations can play successfully. In some cases the station is simply gone, but there are probably many other stations like CJFH - they exist, but require much "special attention" to handle.

Side note: I had no idea how many badly configured sites exist. You'd think website owners, radio stations in particular, would go out of their way to make it easy for people to reach them. But that would be too rational for human beings to be In the early days of the web, where html documents were nearly all hand-crafted, syntax errors in html were the norm, things like mismatched tags, etc. Today most output is computer-generated, so it takes only one small effort to get things right, but still there are monsters out there.

I was writing a parser for ASX playlists, which seems to be the most common format in use today (more common than m3u and pls put together). It's a very simple XML format. There were originally about 5400 asx playlists in the database, and of those, over 1100 (about 20%) were invalid XML. Tags were unmatched, tag case was all over the place (XML tags are case sensitive, so that <FOO> </foo> is not valid), and sometimes the playlist had the asx extension, but in fact was m3u or some other format. That meant I could not be using a regular XML parser for these files, and instead had to spend a few days writing code to handle all those misshapen formats. It was an interesting experience!

Installing on my Win 7 tonight.  Meant to ask before.  Should I 1st delete the files in the folder where I placed the earlier version or will they be overwritten after I unzip and copy or move the latest version to the folder? Should I have also deleted the files in the user app data folder before updating?  

You did well. Just extract the new version over the earlier files. There's no need to delete anything in app data.

I noticed on my XP this morning that even after updating it had still remembered some favorites I had chosen during my random selections with the previous version. Ver 0.1.2b didn't attempt to create the database file like the 1st installation did.

That's because the database already exists. Your favorites (and now, history) will persist, as they should.

In case I need to change the structure of the database with some future release, I'll do my best to keep the existing data, but I'm not making this a cross-my-heart promise as long as ER is at alpha stage. That said, I'm not planning on any heavy restructuring.

As for the configuration, it's still partly in flux. You can keep the configuration file as well, or you can delete it, so that ER will create a new one with all the default settings. (Defaults can change between versions, as was the case with volume control.) Pretty soon I'll add a proper configuration dialog, so this will be less of an issue.

@tranglos

How do I flush the 'History' listing? I tried to manipulate the ethervaneradio-config.ini file by changin the HistorySpan=o but ER still shows a list of radio stations under the 'History' tab. I also changed HistoryMaintain to false but no help there either, the list is still there.

Cleared the history table with SQLiteSpy 

Cheers,

Phil

This is outstanding.

Where is the default db drawn from?

All kinds of sources. Websites, conversion from other formats, etc. I did eliminate a large number of stations that yield 404 and other permanent connection errors, but there still is a number of stations that are or appear defunct. I'll try to trim them at some later point.

"Playing" with ER.  Using the Find Station I put in a couple of station call letters I knew.  They weren't in the database yet.  Went back to your 1st post and read about the search feature so I tried the city name.  Up pops the stations in the DB for the city. COOL!

Clicked on one of them, sorry don't remember which one, and I got this pop-up:



It's the 1st time it has happened and I've brought up a number of random stations and now some in different city or country searches.
This is on my Win 7 x64 with Windows Security Essentials AV.

If it helps I can go back through the history and see if it happens again.
 

Thanks. My thoughts were it had to be something to do with the station since it hadn't happened before on others.  Didn't think about the station wanting to come in using a different port.

Just wanted to give my heartfelt thanks for a fabulous little piece of software.
Living near the flood stricken region of SE QLD Australia I found myself safe but without phone, TV, radio or mobile phone reception yet amazing still had internet connection.
Your program enabled me to tune into the local and regional radio stations and get the latest news, and updates on the flood and road closures.
Thank you! 

That's an awesome first post.