Different use

it's not really designed for that. the big complication is that you'd need some software to create a playlist from drupal audio nodes and act as a source for the web stream. you can put something together but it's a bit tricky. that said if someone did put something together and wanted to submit it, i'd be interested in adding it to the station module.

I would be interested in this feature as well. Is there anything out there that does it (drupal module or script)?

I posted a comment on a different thread about this idea (http://drupal.org/node/250533). Basically I was wondering if there is any convergence after the Drupalcon meeting. I think I am going to tackle part of this problem in the next week.

How would you feel about steps that work toward integrating audio and station more tightly. I see that the archive module already has a dependency on audio. Two things that I am thinking about are playlist and catalog.

As I understand it, station_catalog is all about albums and has no tracks -- the tracks are entered by hand into the playlists. Audio is all tracks and no albums, although musicbrainz could fix that. Is the calalog/album pairing important for Station, or is it just that focusing on albums cuts the number of entries by an order of magnitude? Would it make sense to link albums from station to tracks from Audio? I realize that putting together a playlist takes time and that managing finding that information takes time. Also Station does not really need to care about the actual audio files now. But for this topic which starts to extend station toward scheduling, all of a sudden where the audio lives becomes important.

One step would be to allow the playlists to be generated using the audio_playlist function which a) knows all about where the audio files are and b) allows audio to be added to a data type (station_playlist) that allows it. In this scenario the station_playlist would be just like it is now but not have tracks and those would be attached to a station_playlist by audio. This works pretty well now, although I do not see how with a lmited number of playlists. It would probably need some help to scale. On the other hand, this would allow the embeded players provided by Audio to be used to preview the songs as they are assembled into playlists. And the playlists to be assembled from a wider variety of tools - I guess right now mostly the audio search tools.

all good points... but any future features will have to happen in the D6 version.

Cool!
can i look forward to those sorts of features anytime soon then?

I am looking to do something similar to the user podcasting service, but with video, not just audio.

I can perhaps see a 'quick' way to get this happening:
- playlists are composed of a list of nodes (with the media submitted by the user attached)
- programs and playlists provide an RSS feed, thus consumers could subscribe to a program and recieve all the attached media (either as individual files, or using the archive feature as an entire show)

-joseph

humm... it seems like for those features there'd be other modules that you could assemble to get the functionality. i'm not sure that the station module would be the best basis for it.

believe me, i'm trying combos of every module at drupal.org.

the best thing about station is the being able to map out a schedule - the only thing it lacks is linking to media files. with station I can schedule media in a variety of chunks from individual items in a playlist to days long sequence built from programs.

i suppose it is quite a change to the model though, going from a documentation of the radio stations activities to producing the station broadcast content.

Between Audio, CCK, and Views, I'm pretty sure you could whip up any of the above functionality.

If someone wants to step up and contribute code for an expanded station_archive module, please re-open this.