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[jayzn]

Picture this:

You're ripping it up on the radio.

The listeners are worshipping you in IRC.

The whole world is a slave to the beats emitting from your ethernet cable.

Youre just about to drop the fattest track in your arsenal, really destroy the audience...


and...


then....


bammm...

"The radio server is currently down (Unparsable XML). Please inform an admin."

The radio server shits itself, losing your ratings and record listenership stats.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu......

"Why me???" you cry out... "Why now???"

....

Because you use VDJ and have non "ASCII" characters in your filenames. That's why. It's ALL you baby. That fresh drum and bass track you downloaded from that Hebrew blog just killed the radio.

So, you have questions...

"what is ASCII??? and what the fuck is an XML??? and what does parsable mean?"


To answer your question, first we need to understand a little about computers and how they work!

When you type letters into your keyboard the computer doesn't realize that youre typing letters... it sees a string of ones and zeros called "bits". We all know bits, but how do they relate to letters?

Well read this (stolen from some crappy website):

The actual characters in documents are stored as numeric codes, and today the most common code set is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). ASCII codes extend from 0 to 127; for example, the ASCII code for A is 65, the ASCII code for B is 66, and so on.

Basically what that means is that all letters are (in ASCII) represented by a group of four digits, either being a 1 or 0 (known as a byte).

"I still don't know what you're on about... and how does this tie into VDJ?" I hear you cry. Well, it's like this... XML files are basically a file that holds information. The information inside the XML file can be pretty much anything, XML files aren't really concerned about what is in the file so much as what format the file uses. Thats why XML files are everywhere in computer programming these days. XML files themslves can hold 2-byte characters (like the ones found in Hebrew or Arabic) but the code that uses the XML file to store information often cannot.

So, when youre playing your fat underground dnb track that you swiped from a Hebrew blog, and VDJ sends the track metadata (in a bitstream) to the radioserver, your non-ascii (2 byte) characters in the track idv3 tag get injected into the XML. The server then tries to read (parse) the XML and encounters a bit stream that it cant make any sense of (because the letters were made of 2 byte sets of numbers instead of 1).

So how do you prevent this from happening?

Easy!

take all those weird symbols out of your metadata!

if its not an ascii character... delete it please!

Too much trouble?

Use edcast to stream instead of the VDJ built in streamer.... Edcast won't broadcast your metadata that it receives from VDJ so you dont have to worry about that bit-junk fucking up the radio for yourself and all the djs after.theres some great tutorials in the radio forum about using edcast!

One final thought... every time you break the radio xml GOD KILLS A KITTEN!

FFS! Think of the kittens!

Anyway..... now you know, and knowing is half the battle!

[Aicis]

Use VDJ to record your sets instead

[deejaysterling]

but i love my hebrew music sites! LOL

[djurbanjunkie]

but i love my hebrew music sites! LOL

I need those links pls

[DJ Fluid]

Ah thats what happened to me on my second set. thanks for the info