Episode 08

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Linux Lemming. I’m your host, Rasta Calavera. I was really hoping to do a live recording with this episode. It was going to be kind of the whole focus, and it kind of fell flat on its face, so we will revisit the hows and whys of that happening in just a moment here. All right, so let’s talk about getting lit, and the lit LIT stands for Live Item Tag. So this is a podcast 2.0 namespace, and it’s something that you can put in the RSS feed of your podcast to let the new podcast 2.0 apps know that you are going live, and you’re doing a live recording, or a live broadcast, not a recording. And the only podcast that I’m subscribed to that actually makes the use of this is podcasting 2.0. I think it’s a really cool feature, it makes me really excited about podcasting. But I think more and more content creators will support this in the future, but it is a bit burdensome to wrap your head around it, especially if you’re somebody like myself who watches all this stuff vicariously on the side, and then tries to figure out how to do it all, having no coding background, and this is very limited knowledge on programming languages and things like that. It truly is running the scissors, I got a lot of cuts tonight. But you know what, I think I figured out some of the basic steps, so let’s walk through what that is. Okay, so step one, you need to get a server that will allow you to broadcast a live stream. There’s probably easier approaches to this, maybe there are servers out there that will let you create an account and let you, you know, hop on them as needed. I am self-hosting, so I am using an application called AzuraCast, and this is an internet radio station, and it has a live DJ live broadcast feature. So that is the application that I am running on my server to actually get audio out and available in the wider internet, and let’s take a look. Is anybody currently listening? No. Which I don’t blame you, because right now I just have a loop of Adam Curry saying this lovely little clip of audio. I screwed it up already, I can’t figure anything out anymore. Because I literally can’t figure anything out anymore, I got kind of stuck in a rabbit hole this evening. Oh boy. But so anyway, AzuraCast is doing the broadcasting of all of that, and how I’m sending the audio from my local laptop machine to my headless server running AzuraCast is using a software called Mix with 3X’s. Again, I picked this because it was pre-installed on my machine with my distro of Zoran, so why not? And it was pretty straightforward to connect the two pieces together, so I’m happy enough with that. Now the next step is adding the lit tag to the RSS feed, and I wasn’t sure originally if this had to live inside of the tag for an individual episode, or if this lived outside of that overall item tag, and I compared a couple different feeds, and I finally figured it out, ran it through a validator and everything, and it has to live outside of the item tag. And how it’s actually added into my RSS feed is a little complicated, because I’m using Hugo Static Website Generator, and I’m using Castinet as the theme. I had to play around with the actual, well, two main files, the episode RSS XML in the Castinet theme, and also the default config.toml file. So in the Castinet episode RSS XML file, right below the description of my podcast, I had to put in the podcast live item tag, and within that first line, it had to have the status, so whether it is ended, live, or pending, it also has to have a start and an end time. And those three things, it pulls from the config, the config.toml. I mean, I guess you could come in here and manually put those in, but my thought process was I only want to touch a single file, so I could touch the config file to put in those three things pretty easily, and then just push that up to the site, rather than having to go through all the folder structure of themes, Castinet, layout, you know, all the way down to find the actual file every single time, I could just go to my config and put it in. And then there’s some other fields, too, and these all remain static, so there’s like a title, so I just called it the Linux Lemming Livestream. There’s the enclosure URL, which is the URL to the stream from Azure Cast. You have to say what type it is and the length of it, and I had to do a little bit of a conversion from kilobytes to bytes for the length, nothing too complicated. And then you close it out with a podcast content link, which is basically the same link as above in the enclosure URL, I’m pretty sure that’s okay. That might be if maybe you’re using alternate enclosures, maybe you had other types of streams like a Vorbis stream or an Opus stream or something like that, you’d have a couple different things, but I only have the one, keeping it as easy as possible. Then you close that out with a podcast live item tag. So yeah, in the config file then, I just have three things that I added under the main params section. I added a show live status, and again, I can have three different values pending live or ended, show live start, and this needs to be in an ISO 8601 extended format. So I put a link in my file that’s available on GitLab for everybody to see, just a website that’ll do that conversion for you. So you put in like the date and the time of when you plan on the stream starting and ending and then it converts it and then you just copy and paste it over. So easy peasy. So once that technical stuff is out of the way, you publish it. So it goes to the website, the RSS XML refreshes, everything’s updated. The next step is to send off a pod ping, which will update the podcast index to let everybody know that you’re live basically, and it should send a thing to all of the podcast players and everything else and whatnot. And I got some help with this. I kind of reached out on Mastodon and other places, and the millennial media offensive gave me a Python script that I used, and it said feed is marked for immediate update. So seemed like that worked. But then when I checked the podcast index and everything, didn’t say that I was live. I didn’t get any notifications in Podverse. So I don’t know what that’s about. There was another way, Stephen Bell from, I don’t know if he is directly associated with Sovereign feeds, or if he just had the suggestion of it. But there’s a website called sovereignfeeds.com, and you can look up your RSS feed. It’s basically a standalone RSS feed editor, and you can add podcasting 2.0 tags to your feed from that. You can also send pod pings from that. So I sent a pod ping, and you have to solve a little captcha, and it was like, all right, we’re going to send this for an update. But then, I don’t know, I never got an update, which is confusing to me. But when I ran it through the XML, through the Livewire podcast validator, it said that I have four podcast names based tags. I have the content link, I have the live item, the transcript, and the chapters, and they’re all green. So I’ve done it appropriately. So I don’t know what the missing part is, but you know what, it doesn’t really matter that much because I can’t have my microphone go to both Audacity and Mix at the same time. So even though I have a looping live stream and nobody’s listening to it, it’s not really a value anyway because my voice isn’t on it. So I’ll probably have to reach out to the community and get some help to figure out how I can do some audio routing. But yeah, the coding and stuff, it was just a lot of trial and error. Wasn’t super horrible, you know, to figure out. I don’t know, I got to learn more about GUIDs and how to have that per episode and for the podcast as a whole because I feel like that would be like a good logical next step would be doing something with the GUID. So that’s going to be where I’m headed. But actually, you know what, as long as we’re talking about podcast 2.0 tags, we should just go right into what I’ve been doing with chapters. Oh my goodness. So I started an issue on my GitHub about how one could take a chapter file from Audacity and well, I guess it’s a label. They don’t call it chapters because you can put labels into Audacity and then you can export all your labels with timestamps and it’s like a tab separated text file. So you can get this like nice little output and it’s a three column output and it’s like, you know what, I should be able to take this text file and convert it into a JSON to use it for the chapters for podcasting 2.0. That would make a lot of sense, like this should work. It was way more complicated than I wanted it to be. I wanted to just use built in bash tools to edit the text and everything. But I very quickly learned that you got to use something more robust like Python. That’s where I eventually landed on it. And I had another community member kind of hop in and try to help out Eric. Eric seems like a really cool dude. He’s active on the mastodon. He’s the host of our podcast and I started listening to that recently since he’s helping me out. Just kind of like check out that little area where he is and it’s pretty cool. He uses the castnet theme too and everything. So Eric and I were kind of going back and forth on different approaches for how we could accomplish this because I assume he uses Audacity as well and he’s interested in the podcasting 2.0 namespace. And so, you know, we both have something we want to solve. So awesome to work together to try to solve the problem. And you know what? That’s really the whole value for value mantra, time talent, treasure. He was giving me some time and some talent to just even reach out and say, hey, yeah, let’s work on this. I might be able to help out. So I did a lot of tinkering with it, a lot of different approaches. And I eventually landed on a good enough solution. So basically, I took, I found some different examples of Python scripts online and I mushed them into one file. So I bring in two libraries, import CSV and import JSON. And when you get your export from Audacity, your text file, the first step is to get you to trim away the first column of text. And you can do that just using like a bash tool. So I would use something like to just get rid of that first column of text. And then I want to find a cleaner way to round out the values just to the nearest whole number. That might be something to do with AWK. I’m not quite sure on that, but cut is just a clean, easy way to get rid of that first column of numbers so that you’re just left with start times and titles. And then in your file, you have to add headers of start time and title to your text file because that’s needed for the final JSON. So once you’ve done that to your text file, then you’re ready to start launching this Python script that I kind of mushed together. So it loads two libraries, it then will open up the text file and you have to put in the proper name of the text file. So you need to have an established naming scheme if you don’t constantly want to change things inside of this Python script. So it opens your text file, it reads the items. The first thing it does is it finds all of the tab spaces and cuts the tab space and replaces it with a comma and then it will save that file as a CSV file and then it will open up that CSV file and it pulls everything into a JSON array. And then once you’ve got this whole JSON array going in, it will strip everything out, create the new file and then spit it out to where it needs to be. So the very last step then is once you have this JSON file, you just need to add the versions and the chapters to the top of the header. And so that’s where I’m at right now with getting chapters easily created and not having to do too much by hand. Ideally it’d be nice to automate the entire process, but I just don’t have the coding background and the knowledge to do easy loops through all that stuff because how I envision it actually working is you’d export your text file and it would have the name, episode, E, number, number, number, three digit number and then you drop that into a folder and then the second it’s dropped into the folder, your machine is aware like, oh, time to convert this and then it just does everything for you and you get the JSON file and then you throw that on the website and link to it and everything. So that would be the ideal flow for that. So yeah, maybe Eric will come in and do some looping magic and get that all to be awesome and hopefully I’ll figure out this whole lit business because I think it’d be pretty cool to just do a little live broadcast pretty easy, but I got to figure out pod ping and I got to figure out my audio routing I guess, it’s just kind of a little bit of a, not great with that. All right, well that brings us to the end of this episode of the Linux Lemon. Oh, that is weird, it’s only coming in a single channel. Okay, wow, let’s see here, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. says it is sending a pod ping live pod ping sent the other one marked for immediate update I don’t know how to like verify anything with that but who knows we’ll see okay well a lot of new things going on tonight it’s not very scientific change all the things and complain when it doesn’t work goodness goodness goodness okay keep that up so I kind of see if anybody does get on to the channel see if it’s live I wonder why those are gray that one’s not maybe the newest one is always one up hmm hmm hmm okay we’re gonna talk about the blogs and the kit lab is organized these tabs here oh yeah I don’t have the when a mix going because it keeps crashing with audacity let’s see if I can get mix up and running does not like to play kindly with audacity unable to open error opening okay yep because audacity is using the mobile pre USB audio so let’s okay well crashed let me reconfigure you mix let me change my inputs man retry after fixing the issue reconfigure get help exit yes I would like to reconfigure please but it all just crashes oh good god alright turn the recording back on so going going lit live item tag is I don’t know it’s probably not gonna work but got some some good leads as to why so let me catch everybody up on what’s going on issue number one audio routing so I have a microphone going into a mixer and then I have two balanced quarter inches to a three and a half millimeter stereo jack output from the mixer that I’m putting into an M audio USB interface that connects to the computer and when I have two software stacks open audacity and mix they can’t pull from the same source which is crazy to me and I don’t know if that’s because I’m not using jack and I’m just using the default also I think I feel like if I was using jack I should be able to patch in the microphone input to both applications but as it stands I cannot oh no parsing error that’s not good what did I break man so I ran my XML through a validator for the RSS feed and it said my live item was wrong when I looked at the example compared to mine I had a closing out tag in the very first line there and when I look at how it should be set up from the bare bones example there’s just a closing greater than bracket and so that’s what I did but it doesn’t look like it helps hmm all right podcast live item status got that got that got that just a closing bracket and I’ve got the title the enclosure URL make sure that looks the same closure URL it’s got a forward slash greater than closure yep yep and then double enclosure podcast live item at the end yep now when I had the slash in there I didn’t get this error hmm XML parsing error not well formed status there’s an ampersand is that what it’s yelling at me about well that would be in my config so that’s the live