Alpha tags with BC895 and Scannercast ?

[Tweekerbob]

You do not need to have an Icecast server .RR has several and you can you those. If you have applied, and were approved for an online feed, they will give you the icecast server address and password. Oddcast or Edcast (same thing) can be pointed to the Icecast address and it is an encoder, so you're all good. All you need is Serproxy, TGM and odd(Ed)cast, if you want to feed through RR. You will need Icecast server only if you want to host your own private feed.

 

[nexus]

73cuda while you're at it, your volume is way too low. I have to just about turn my speaker volume knob up all the way in order to make out what's being said. So you might want to try turning the vol knob on the scanner up just a bit.

Also I noticed just now that you're still not broadcasting tags yet. just wondering, you are running Serproxy and it says it's found a client right? You should have 2 dos type windows open at the same time, one will be serproxy and the other will be talkgroup monitor.

 

[Tweekerbob]

You do not need to have an Icecast server .RR has several and you can you those. If you have applied, and were approved for an online feed, they will give you the icecast server address and password. Oddcast or Edcast (same thing) can be pointed to the Icecast address and it is an encoder, so you're all good. All you need is Serproxy, TGM and odd(Ed)cast, if you want to feed through RR. You will need Icecast server only if you want to host your own private feed.

 

[73cuda]

You do not need to have an Icecast server .RR has several and you can you those. If you have applied, and were approved for an online feed, they will give you the icecast server address and password. Oddcast or Edcast (same thing) can be pointed to the Icecast address and it is an encoder, so you're all good. All you need is Serproxy, TGM and odd(Ed)cast, if you want to feed through RR. You will need Icecast server only if you want to host your own private feed.

That is what I thought ! I just couldn't understand why I would need to send from my icecast server to RR's icecast. THANK YOU !

Here's what I'm doing now:
Simplecast encoding to RR's icecast server > (with all of RR's provided info)
running Serproxy >
running TGM

Is that the right way ?

TGM seems to be sending the tags but none are showing up, below is the monitor.cfg file for TGM...

SCANNER_HOST=192.168.1.101
SCANNER_PORT=5331

ICECAST_HOST=audio1.radioreference.com
ICECAST_PORT=80
ICECAST_URI=/715199924
ICECAST_USERNAME=73CUDA
ICECAST_PASSWORD=b2q7jv9r (I changed PW to post here)
ICECAST_RESPONSE=HTTP/1.0 200 OK

I have no idea if I have used the correct ICECAST_USERNAME=73CUDA or not ???

My feed is working but again, no tags. nexus, I turned the volume up some more and I'll get it as high as possible with no clipping after I get this tag problem solved, thanks for making me aware of that. Oh yeah, serproxy does say "thread started" and it all appears to be working correctly ???

 

[nexus]

ICECAST_URI= should be your mount_point on RR not /715199924 unless that is what they sent you as your mount point. For example My feed is Jackson County, MS, so my mount point is ms_jackson.
So it would look like this in my settings: ICECAST_URI=/ms_jackson

As for ICECAST_USERNAME mine was always admin so you might want to try changing it to admin but use the password that rr gave to you for the feed. Unless they told you to use a different username. You could always try changing 73cuda to admin and see if that works. Also case might be sensitive so you might want to set 73cuda to all lower case.

something else.... you might want to try forwarding port 80 and 8181 on your router for the ip that your machine is connected from 192.168.1.101 in case something in the router is blocking packets on either of those ports from being sent out. It won't hurt anything to open them up.

and the volume is a little better. I can hear what dispatch is saying now with my speaker volume set to 12 o'clock position which is about normal for me. Still have to crank the winamp volume all the way to 100% but it's getting there.


edit: looking at my old talkgroup monitor cfg file this was what I had for my uri.
ICECAST_URI=/admin/metadata.xsl?mount=/ms_jackson&mode=updinfo&song=%s

 

[73cuda]

nexus, /715199924 is the mount assigned to me by RR, I did have the ICECAST_USERNAME set to admin and I had tried upper and lower case for 73cuda. I had already done the port forwarding on 80 and 8000 in my router. Also, when I used ICECAST_URI=/admin/metadata.xsl?mount=/715199924&mode=updinfo&song=%s, TGM would not get the "OK" rcvd back.

So here's what I just did, since I switched from oddcast to Simplecast (as oddcast was not sending the tags to RR either), in monitor.cfg I commented out the Icecast stuff and uncommented the Simplecast section, added my PC's IP and port number and holy cow, I'm now getting alpha tags being sent with my RR audio feed !!! FINALLY ! The only thing I'm not 100% happy with is that the tags now scroll in Winamp rather than static, but at least they are there now.

I highly recommend Simplecast, very easy to use and I think the audio is clearer too. Speaking of the audio, I am running out of the LINE out on the BC895XLT to LINE IN on my sound card. I have the line in volume all the way up on the PC and the volume on the BC895XLT 3/4 full. I'll try some other options such as speaker out or MIC in and see if I can get louder and keep it clean. I also have an 1:1 isolation transformer inline.

Now if I can get someone in Marion county to feed the MCSO digital to RR.

Thank you all for all your time and help, I really appreciate it,

Steve


BTW: My feed may go down for a little while sometime soon as I'll be switching to a dedicated PC. And, you may notice some static once in a while, this is due to when we have really heavy storms here my signal drops, I think due to all the leaves getting wet (?) I'll see if I can add that to my feed info.

 

[Tweekerbob]

Yeah, I was going to recommend uncommenting the Simplecast stuff in the monitor.cfg file. Use that instead of the Icecast stuff. Your Icecast username and password are way off. Gordon had to tell me what to use. But using Simplecast to encode the text tags along with the audio is going to be your best bet anyhow.

If you are getting good peformance out of the Line out to Line-in, I think the 1:1 transformer is great. It'll get rid of any ground loop problems and allow you to use the volume on your scanner freely. The Mic in is going to be somwhere around 16K ohms, not that great a match compared to your line in.I haven't listened to your feed, but if the volume settings you have are working for you, don't fix what isn't broken.

Ryan

 

[nexus]

I am seeing text tags on winamp from here now so it looks like you finally got it going. I have noticed that your mount point id is showing up in the feed instead of what it use to say which was Ocala I believe.

 

[73cuda]

I am seeing text tags on winamp from here now so it looks like you finally got it going. I have noticed that your mount point id is showing up in the feed instead of what it use to say which was Ocala I believe.

Yeah, it's finally going. I have TGM setup to send "Scanning Ocala" when no tags are being sent. I don't know how to not have the mount show up, it would be better without it.

 

[73cuda]

Now that all that's working, is it possible to get statistics sent from the RR icecast server back to my Simplecast ? I filled out the relay info and when it attempted to get info back from RR's server it said "authentication required" so my info supplied by RR isn't what's needed for this I assume.

Is this possible ?

 

[nexus]

In edcast right click on the encoder you created and choose configure. You'll get a new window that has three tabs at the top, BASIC SETTINGS / YP SETTINGS / ADVANCED SETTINGS

Click on the YP SETTINGS TAB and in here you'll want to change the name of your stream, this is where winamp is broadcasting your mountpoint id. You'll see a box called stream name. Put in there whatever you want to be broadcasted to winamp along with the text tags.

So instead of it showing Ocala Scanning (71599924) in winamp it would show

Ocala Scanning (Ocala PD & FD) or what ever you put in the stream name box.

 

[73cuda]

yeah, but as I state in post 24 above, I switched to Simplecast. After your post, I went in and changed the equivalent of what you said to do in oddcast/edcast. I had station name blank so I put "Live" in, I always like seeing live on races and sports on TV.

So now my info seen in Winamp doesn't scroll (unless the tag is long) and when no tags are being sent it switches to "Scanning Ocala" to identify the feed.

Thanks nexus, that helped,

Steve