Voice messages

Listeners can record a voice message on the station's website. Those messages arrive as files in a folder on the server. RemotePLE looks into that folder regularly and reports when something new has come in.

Open the window with Ctrl+N or by clicking the indicator on the right of the status bar.


When is it reported?

The folder is checked in the background at a fixed interval, five minutes by default. If something has been added, it is spoken ("A new voice message has arrived") and the count appears on the right of the status bar in a pulsing red field.

No window opens and no question is asked, and that is deliberate. A message can arrive in the middle of a live show, and a window pulling the focus at that moment would be the worst possible answer.

The pulsing stops as soon as you open the window. The messages concerned stay marked as "new" in the state column until you close it again.

On the very first run with a folder not seen before, nothing is reported. Only what is already there is noted down. Otherwise the whole stock would come out as "new" on the first start, and one quickly learns to ignore that.


The window

The list shows the newest message at the top. It has three columns:

File - the file name as it is on the server.
Received - date and time, read out of the file name.
State - "new", "known" or "outside".

"outside" means the folder of the message does not lie below any of the assigned root paths. Such a message can be listened to, but not taken into the playlist or the on-air list, because RadioBOSS would not find the file.

Buttons:

Refresh - reads the folder again straight away, without waiting for the next round. F5 does the same.
Listen - loads the selected message and plays it in the player. A double click on the row does the same.
Insert - opens the menu with the four insert positions. Enter in the list opens the same menu.
Close - closes the window. Escape does the same.


Inserting

The target is always the tab active on the left, so either the playlist or the on-air list. The four positions and their accelerator letters are the ones from the context menu of the source tabs, so there is nothing new to learn.

"Behind the current track" exists only for the on-air list, because only there is a track running. With several messages selected they are inserted in the order of the list.

If neither the playlist nor the on-air list is active on the left, RemotePLE says so instead of quietly doing nothing.


Setting it up

The folder is entered by hand in the file Servers.ini, in the section of the server profile concerned. There is no page for it in the settings: the feature only concerns stations that offer this on their website.

Msg-Folder - the path on the server, for example /Sprachnachrichten. If it is left empty the feature is off, the shortcut does nothing and nothing appears in the status bar.
Msg-Interval - the gap between two checks in minutes, 1 to 60 are allowed.
Msg-LastSeen - written by RemotePLE itself and should not be edited by hand. It holds what was last seen.

The connection for this is opened once and kept. A login per check would be more than a thousand logins a day at a one-minute interval, which many servers treat as an attack and block.
