• A custom build control panel and dashboard
• Song Recognition
• Audio stream detection
• Silence Detectors
• Mobile Phone App development
• Track reporting

I’ve been involved in helping with the coding and programming of the backend and front end services that the autopo.st platform is built on, mainly using HTML and PHP programming skills.

The post Latest autopo.st updates first appeared on Gavin Watson.

Turns out it looks like Twitter have made a change to their BotMakers algorithm and tons of accounts are getting locked because of this change, including a load of our own autopo.st customers.

At the moment there has been no official response from Twitter about this, but so far it is clear that something changed on their side on or around 21st March 2017.

From there, many of our customers are having their Twitter accounts locked due to this ‘malicious activity’ yet nothing has changed on our platform.

All that we can suggest at the moment is the following, as suggested on our autpo.st page here :

Please visit this link BEFORE resetting your password; https://support.twitter.com/forms/general?subtopic=suspended and from there, ask why your account has been locked and an explanation of what has happened, indicating that the traffic is legitimate and not malicious. From there, please proceed to reset you password by simply logging into your account at this page https://twitter.com/login 

We’ve got this entry going on the Twitter Community page here but there has been little response from Twitter other than a response quoting that it is not an API issue, rather it is an issue with individual accounts, which I feel is not strictly true.

It looks like this isn;t the first time this has happened (the algorithm went a little haywire) as reported in this post by website Tech Crunch

I’d be keen to hear from anyone that is suffering from the same issues to post here, or even better on the Twitter Community page here.

I’m hoping we can get some kind of response from Twitter as we’ve spent 3 years developing the autopo.st platform and at the moment it’s not looking great.

The post 326 – To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, this account is temporarily locked. Please log in to https://twitter.com to unlock your account. first appeared on Gavin Watson.

“Wouldn’t it be great if I could get the name of the songs that were playing on the radio station onto Twitter so that followers could see what was being played” I thought…

So after a but of research and armed with my knowledge of PHP off I set.

Getting the names of the songs to appear on Twitter was relatively easy. A bit of PHP coding, some BASH scripting and off you go… Easy!

Then came the “Wouldn’t it be cool of you could post an image of the artist that was playing?” challenge! I remember it well… That added quite a bit more complication to how it all worked. Challenge accepted!

“How about if you could tag the artist that was being played? That would be cool!” was the next one. Again, all possible, the data is out there.

By this time a few radio stations have found out about the service and are actually paying to use the system. Time to start advertising this! Along came www.twitterautopost.co.uk. The website ( a .co.uk because they are cheaper to purchase) advertised the service to see if there was any real interest in the service. Turns out, YES! there was an interest, quite a big one!

The issue now is that people are (obviously) wanting to change details and configuration (the message to be posted, the frequency, whether to post images or not, etc…). Cue a MAJOR rethink of how all this is going to work. Time to design a Control Panel!

So as I had coded and written most of this myself, I decided to go ahead and see if I would write up and code a customer control panel myself… Yes as it turns out! This was a very big change to how the whole system worked. There were already a number of stations using the service, so this all had to be rolled out without causing any disruption to the existing users so along cam the painful moving of each account form the ‘manual’ system to the new ‘2.0’ system whereby users could log into their own account and make the changes themselves in realtime.

Stay tuned for the next update to bring us right up to date with where the project is now!

The post And so autopo.st is born… first appeared on Gavin Watson.

There are a few options for you to consider regarding setting up an online radio station, firstly how are you going to use it? Will it be just to play music, like a jukebox? Will you be playing mostly music and a small number of live shows? Will it be mostly live shows?

The answers to these questions will determine the best route to take when setting up your own radio station.

Now, just to confuse you, let’s start at the end!

Regardless of how you actually broadcast (live, recorded, voicetracking, just music, etc) you will always need a streaming server. This is what sends your content to all your listeners. Without going into a huge amount of technical detail, you create your content, whether it be a live show or just music and you create this content only once and send it to your streaming server and then the server sends it on to your listeners. You would need a ton of Internet bandwidth and processing power to do this yourself, that’s why streaming servers exist.

Hang on! Can I not do that myself? Well, no… You will create one stream of music and this needs to be distributed to all of your listeners. It is highly unlikely that your home/office internet connection will be able to cope with this. This is why you create one stream of music and then send it on to your streaming server to serve to your listeners as and when they want to tune in.

So, to get started, you will definitely need a streaming server. We’ll narrow your choices down to just three things to consider.

Which type? The first thing to consider is what ‘type’ of streaming server will you be using. There are. In my opinion, two main types, Shoutcast and Icecast. While there are some differences, their job is the same, to get your broadcast to your listeners. Personally I prefer Shoutcast but that could simply be because I have had more exposure to using it, both work perfectly well. The user panel is slightly different as is the way you connect to the server, but they both perform the same task

How many listeners? The second thing to consider is how many listener slots you need. This part of the decision making has always proved to be slightly confusing. When choosing a streaming server, you will nearly always be asked ‘how many listener slots’ you want. What this means is that you have to decide how many listeners you want to be able to handle at any one time. It doesn’t refer to daily or monthly limits, only how many simultaneous listeners you can serve at any given moment. The reason this is relevant and nearly always asked is because streaming server hosts pay for bandwidth and depending on how much bandwidth they need, they pay more. They also need to reserve this bandwidth for you so that if you get a surge of listeners, then can cope with it. Unfortunately it is quite common for stream hosts to ‘oversell’ their bandwidth in a hope that not everyone will use their maximum slots at any given time. Beware of streaming server hosts offering ‘unlimited slots’ this is very misleading! Not only do you ‘have’ to specify a maximum number of listeners for your server, no streaming company could be able to honour this offer if all of a sudden your station became globally famous and you had thousands of listeners tuning it.

Another common problem here is that some streaming companies charge for bandwidth usage. In my opinion, beware of this. Unless you are a mathematical wizard, you really don’t want to be worried about how much bandwidth on a daily basis, what you really want is to be able to broadcast your radio station without any nasty surprises in case you go over the bandwidth you use. Just go for a ‘maximum slot’ monthly option and don’t worry about how much bandwidth you use.

So, your best option here is to start small, get the station launched, make sure your streaming server provider is happy to grow with you as you need more slots (some stream hosts do not allow these changes). I’d say a reasonable amount of slots to get started with is 50 or 100 and see how it goes from there. You’ll be able to monitor the statistics via your control panel so you can see if you are reaching your maximum listener slots at any time and simply upgrade when you do. Again, this does not mean that you’ll only be able to have 50 or 100 listeners per month, it just means that at any one time you can only allow this many listeners to tune in.

Quality? The final consideration for your streaming server is the actual level of quality of the stream. This will depend on what you are going to broadcast, will it be voice only (talk radio), will it be a combination of both, or will you be looking to stream high quality music content? In basic terms, the higher the quality you want, the more bandwidth you need. This is where, on purchasing a streaming server, you will probably be asked how many ‘kbps’ you require, or they will be marked as ‘maximum kbps’.

Breaking this down, generally you have three options. Talk Radio (speech only) is typically 48-64kbps, speech and music is typically 128kbps and high quality audio is 192kbps. Please note I say ‘typically’! You can get decent speech down to 24kbps and you can get decent music content in 64kbps, but these have been seen to be the standard choices.

We could go on to discuss a newer type of stream (AAC+) which is being used to serve content to mobile devices and allows you to better serve content to mobile devices, but this could confuse matters even more!

So, your three choices : Server type (Shoutcast or Icecast), Maximum listener slots and audio quality. The standard starter pack is typically a Shoutcast server with 100 slots at 128kbps. This is more than enough to get you started.

OK, back to the beginning!

If you will only be playing your own selection of music in a jukebox style station, then you probably have two options, either use a feature called AutoDJ which allows you to upload all your songs to your streaming server and play them from there, this means that you do not need a computer dedicated to playing your music or connected to your internet using up bandwidth, you do all the administration online via your control panel and make any changes there. The advantages of this option are that you don’t need to be permanently connected to the internet (using bandwidth), you don’t need a dedicated PC and you don’t run the risk of your station being down if your PC crashes or your home/office internet line being down. The disadvantages are that you have to pay for storage space on the server which will limit the amount of songs you can store. Another consideration is the limited amount of configuration and scheduling you can make.

Another option is to do the same thing, but from your own computer. The advantage here is that you are not paying for storage space on your streaming server (hard drives are relatively cheap these days), you can choose your own playout software and make as many configuration changes you want. The downside is that you need a dedicated PC and a decent internet connection.

So, what about if you want to host your own live shows every now and then?
Well, actually, the above two options are still valid. AutoDJ allows live connections to the server whenever you want and if you host on your own PC, then you can simply hook up a mic and you’re away. Again, both options are valid.
The main differences here are that if you want to connect up to your own AutoDJ server, you will still need another PC to send the stream to it, in fact depending on how well you want to do it, you will need an audio source (another PC with all your music on, CD players, Turntables or any other source of music) and of course you will need your own microphone, it is more than likely that you will need some kind of small mixing desk to hook all these up to and then into your encoding PC and then off to your streaming server or AutoDJ.

This is somewhere in between the options of having a mainly live radio station. You move away from the AutoDJ system and more towards having the station content generated from where the studio is going to be located.

AutoDJ does, however, prove very useful if you want to have a station whereby you have a number of remote DJs and no physical studio location. Each DJ would be allowed to broadcast on your station at their allocated slot time and connect and disconnect via a set of rules and a username and password. When no DJ connects to the server, your AutoDJ takes over and simply plays music.

Another option is where you want a more professional approach to your station and have a physical studio located somewhere (your studio, office or home studio). This would typically comprise of a decent microphone, a small mixing desk, an audio source (CD players, turntables, PC with a database of music, etc) and finally a PC which would encode your music content and send it off to your streaming server.
Quite how complex this set up is greatly depends on your requirements. You could have 3 or 4 microphones for talk radio and guests, a number of CD players, some turntables if you’re playing vinyl or a laptop with your favourite MP3’s stored on it. Your mixing desk could be analogue or digital with a number of inputs. When choosing your missing desk, always try and think how your setup may grow and buy one with enough inputs but while sticking to your budget.

So, we’ve covered streaming servers and your studio setup, but we still haven’t covered how to actually get your live show delivered to your streaming server.
If you will only be playing music from your server via AutoDJ, then all your music is already on your server so you do not really need to worry about this part as it doesn’t apply, but if you will be producing your live shows or sending music to your server from your studio then you need a way of getting it there.
If you are just sending music from your PC to your streaming server then you can do this from the same PC and depending on what software you are using to play the music it may have a built in encoder.
If you have a small studio with a mixer, then you will need to take the output from your mixer into your encoding PC (line input) and set up some encoding software on the PC which will then send your audio to your streaming server. Essentially it takes analogue audio and coverts it into data to send over the internet to your streaming server.
There are a few options for you here, you could use Winamps DSP (free) which allows you to connect up to your streaming server or a more professional approach and use RadioBoss’s ‘Caster’ which give you many more options.

Whichever approach you use to get your audio from your studio to your streaming server, you’ll be needing some important details, which are the IP or hostname of your server and the port number you have been allocated. You will also need to specify whether or not you’ll be using MP3 or AAC encoding and also the bitrate (audio quality) you will be using, this will have been decided when you chose a streaming server. All you need to do is enter these details into your encoder and hit connect and you’ll be streaming to your server!
It is important to remember that if you do broadcast from your studio, office or home studio, that your encoding PC will have to be left on permanently and connected to the internet using bandwidth. This is a consideration if you have capped bandwidth on your broadband plan as audio streaming uses a lot of bandwidth! It will probably help if you shop around on usave and find the best solution out there. Bandwidth is a funny thing that costs more or less depending on which country you are in.

So, what have we learned?

Well, you need to decide what type of Radio Station you want to set up first and plan it out, are you just going to play music, will you be doing the occasional show, will you have remote presenters or DJ’s, will you have a physical studio somewhere, how will you get the audio to the streaming server and what type of server will you be using, how many listeners slots and what audio quality?

Contact us if you need help choosing your best options and if you’d like to discuss how to set up your radio station.

Streaming server providers : Radio Services – Easyweb Communications

The post Setting up a radio station? first appeared on Gavin Watson.

TuneIn is HUGE!

There are hundreds of thousands of radio stations broadcasting on TuneIn. Everyone that has a radio station uses TuneIn as a platform to broadcast to the masses, mainly to mobile and tablet devices. Everyone competing for listeners.

TuneIn have released their API and now allow you to send the song that your radio station is playing to them via this API. Previously they would only update the song you were playing once you had tuned in. Now, you can send them the song you are currently playing and they will show your station if a listener makes a search for that particular song.

So, I came up with a way to automatically post your Radio Stations ‘Now Playing’ song directly to TuneIn! Let your potential listeners search for their favourite song and it could be playing on YOUR radio station!

The TuneIn Auto Post service can automatically grab the song that is currently playing on your radio station and send it to TuneIn so that it appears on the TuneIn Radio Directory!

This is a MUST for every radio station that takes attracting listeners seriously.

The system is compatible with Shoutcast (v1 or v2), Icecast or Radionomy. If you are already on TuneIn then we can get your current ‘Now Playing song sent to TuneIn to be displayed. This is a great marketing tool and will help you grow your station quickly.

All we need is your Shoutcast (v1 or v2), Icecast or Radionomy stream details and your TuneIn API details (see this page) and then just sign up and we’ll have your songs automatically posted to TuneIn!

So, if you are interested in getting this for your radio station, take a look at this page.

The post TuneIn Auto Post first appeared on Gavin Watson.

Last year I started work on a service that allows Radio Stations to automatically post their “Now Playing” songs to Twitter.

It’s been very busy with this project as more and more requests came in for additional features and now this is where we are with this project with regards to features and functionality.

– Compatible with Shoutcast (v1/v2), Icecast & Radionomy.
– Compatible with most playout & automation systems.
– Customisable messages including hashtags
– Customisable posting frequency
– Dynamically replace the artist/band/group name with their official Twitter account.
– Add the artists/groups/bands image to each Tweet.
– Add a “Buy this Song” link to each Tweet.

The feedback from users of this service has been excellent as many radio stations have seen a huge increase in followers, retweets (sometimes by the artist themselves) and many favourited tweets. There was one tweet that got retweeted to over 170.000 followers.

There’s more information about the service over at www.twitterautopost.co.uk or if you are interested then just drop me an email here.

The post Update : Twitter Auto Post first appeared on Gavin Watson.

I’m only six weeks in and I’ve already had enough… South West Trains offer an appalling service for the prices they charge. There are constant delays and overcrowding on their trains and I’ve had enough. They offer nothing but excuses for the delays and the overcrowding seems to be ‘normal service’ to them, to the degree of ‘you are lucky there is actually a train to get on’. When questioning staff about delays most of the time they just laugh and joke about it. Well, it’s not a joke to me, this shoddy service costs me a whopping £481.60 of my hard earned cash every single month. That’s a lot of money. I’d just about swallow that top dollar price if they offered a top dollar service, but they don’t… They really don’t!

Delays on nearly every single journey so far, up to 3 hour delays (standing on platforms in sub zero temperatures and rain), cancellations and overcrowding… But we still have to pay the top price for this? Surely this can’t be right?

So, from 1st March 2015, I am going to send them monthly invoices for the time I am losing due to their constant delays. I have been told that I’m wasting my time, that nothing will come of it, but being the determined person that I am, I’m not just going to put up with it. They are just not providing the service they are selling and if it were any other company or business we would not put up with it. you went to a restaurant for a meal and didn’t get a seat, would you put up with it? If your new car kept on stopping or running slow

I will be engaging with social media, the press and my contacts in the broadcast and media industry to raise awareness of this issue and while my expectations of actually getting anywhere with this are very low, I am just not going to stand back and nothing.

I’m going to contact the Citizens Advice Bureau, I’m going to complain directly to the Managing Director of South West Trains (Tim Shoveller), I’m going to contact Passenger Focus and I will also contact the relevant bodies within the Government.

I will be adding more content here as and when I can.

Oh, and if you’re thinking ‘why are you wasting your time on this’? I’m doing all of this while I’m on a delayed train! My time is already wasted!

Here are some contact details:

South West Trains
South West Trains – Compensation Info
Tim Shoveller – Managing Director of South West Trains
Citizens Advice Bureau
Passenger Focus

The post I’m going to invoice South West Trains for their delays first appeared on Gavin Watson.

I’ve just bought myself this Eonon G2110 Head End unit to replace the default Audio 20 unit in a Mercedes Benz W204.

The Eonon G2210 offers a lot of flexibility and is Android based which means it can easily be customised. It offers all the benefits of a tablet with the advantage of being a double DIN head end unit.

I was initially looking at installing a tablet in the car but then realised that there was no need to try and re-invent the wheel when there was already this type of unit available, and at a decent price. The unit is currently available from Amazon UK at a very decent price of £265.

This isn’t quite a review yet, but I’m hoping that this post will show up in some Google searches for the same problem that I have encountered. My issue is that it seems impossible to connect the unit up to the CANBUS system (present in the Mercedes Benz, but also in a large number of other vehicles.

The manufacturer of the unit, Eonon, have told me that the unit is not compatible with the CANBUS system, but the unit has a steering wheel unit screen and I fail to understand what other purpose this learning screen does if it is not for decoding the CANBUS signals from both the steering wheel and the other items that would be handy (next/previous track, answer, hang up, vaolume up and down, etc…)

So, I am hoping that this post will get picked up for other people struggling to do the same and we can help each other out.

At the moment I have ordered these cables in a hope that I can get something working:

CTSMC005.2 MERCEDES C CLASS 2007 – 2013 STEERING STALK CONTROL ADAPTOR INTERFACE

If you come across this thread, and you have been able to find anything out, please let me know. Also, if you are looking for a solution, please leave a comment below and we’ll see if we can get this working!

EDIT : I managed to finally get this working. As soon as I can I will post the instructions and a brief guide on how I got it to work.

UPDATE : DO NOT BUY ONE OF THESE UNITS! I’m on my second unit and it is now unusable. They are utterly useless. The first one went back after a few months, it just died. I was sent an ‘updated’ replacement unit under warranty which laster a few more months and then the SD card slot broke and now it just factory resets itself when I turn it on. Eonon will not help as it is now out of warranty. AVOID THIS BRAND!

The post Installing the Eonon G2210 head end unit in a Mercedes W204 first appeared on Gavin Watson.