As some of you may know or have noticed, the old radio is no longer being used, as it's not working anymore since the server hosting it have moved.
So the choice was to either bring up a simple radio with a randomly played playlist (or with a custom playlist), or to make a new one from scratch. We chose the 2nd option.
I've been working for the past few months on it, whenever I had some time, and it's now in an usable, stable state, and with a decent amount of features and interactivity that makes it a fun feature again.
You can look at its output, and use it, in the #exodus-home channel, where we host other stuff such as the "Useless Facts" script.
So, how does it work, how can you use it, and what does it offer?
Music Library
The radio contains a music library of over 6000 songs now. More songs can be added by trusted people through FTP access. Don't ask for access yet, we still have some people with that access (and adding more soon), so chances are you'll find the song you like there already.
Random Playback
By default, the radio keeps playing songs at random.
Currently Played Song
Whenever a new song is played, the radio automatically gives the song information, along with other info, to the IRC channel. You can retrieve that same information anytime using the !radio command.
Get Help
You can see a list of the available commands for your IRC status by using the !help command.
Search for Songs
You have 2 commands available that lets you search for your favorite song in the whole playlist: !search (or its alias !s) and !searchpage (or its alias !sp).
With !search you can look for songs using any amount of words. The radio will look for those words in both author and title strings, and if ALL of them are found in a single song, that song will be added to the search results.
To prevent spam of the channel, search results are divided into "pages" of results, which you can browse with the !searchpage command. The results, after a search, are cached so using the !searchpage is completely safe and not using as many resources as the !search MAY use (the !search itself searches through cached data, so it's quite fast too).
You'll see that some songs have the wrong title, missing author or other problems, that's because the uploader of those songs did a poor job tagging them with the right information, and will need to be fixed one by one. :/
Play a Specific Song
An enqueue system (as the one used in the previously used radio software) isn't implemented yet (I'm working on it), but in the meanwhile you can request a single song with the !playsong command.
Please note that using this command will promptly stop the currently played song and start the new one. Please don't abuse it, and always make sure the other listeners aren't listening to one of their favorites before using this command.
This command requires a number as parameter, you can find that number in search results, at the left of each song title (such as #1000). Use it as: !playsong 1000.
Listening to the Radio
Direct links for both Winamp and Windows Media Player are available on the top of the forums, I'll add them here for your ease:
Winamp (and compatible, like VLC): http://exoduscommuni...8000/listen.pls
Windows Media Player: http://www.exoduscom...exodusradio.asx
Future
More stuff will be added to the radio, like the good old enqueue system (which I call "Live-DJ"), and I'll try to add all the other nice features that the old radio had and report here when they're done.
Have fun!
P.S.
there are other commands, but they are available only to moderators and above.
