Sound Of Faz Radio is going all in with a 24/7 365 days a year internet radio station. Building it all myself, this is the blog following my journey including all highs and lows of this mammoth project!
After noticing a couple of shows with 30 seconds of silence at the beginning, I realised these were my live shows that were recorded directly on mixcloud (as opposed to being recorded myself and edited afterwards) so I downloaded them, deleted the originals, edited, mastered and re-added so if you follow us on mixcloud you may notice quite a few shows appearing as ‘new’ but dated some time in 2021 – this is why. It means those particular shows are now of much better quality too.
If you hit ‘Play’ on SOF Radio and notice any silence at the beginning, please let us know by sending us an email here. No number of issues or bugs are too many – we want to know if things aren’t quite working properly!
Potential development
Currently looking at if I can pull in the currently playing track to SOF Radio from Mixcloud. It is probably unrealistic as even if I can from a technical point of view, every show needs tracklistings creating first (as only a handful of them currently do) but I am looking into it.
Stay tuned…
We have now added a mobile menu to include all the pages on mobile and in the mobile app (before we only had the 4 links across the bottom)
Click the red icon in the top right of every page as per the below screenshots.
We’ve also been tweaking the audio so there are less gaps between tracks and more of a blended transition between them.
Stay tuned…
You may notice on the Listen page that it doesn’t always refresh on the hour to load a new show like I said previously, this is down to a bug I’m working through. You will also notice the odd bit of stuff on the page like a countdown timer appear every now and again, this is just for development purposes whilst I work on things.
In the meantime you can still enjoy the tunes by hitting play on the player, if a show finishes and it all goes quiet that just means the page hasn’t refreshed like it should do so just refresh the page the normal way and a new show will load.
We’ve said before, and we’ll say it again, to keep updated with things, and to get a nice notification every time we publish a post like this, install the app. It’s the best way to enjoy SOF Radio. Just hit the button below and when Chrome tells you it would like to show you notifications for the latest news and updates, hit ‘Allow’ to ensure you can receive notifications. For iOs users, the app needs to be installed manually (and clicking the button below won’t do anything) See more details on how to install on an iOs device here
If you haven’t been following the SOF Radio journey, you may have missed the fact that we launched in April 2022 then went offline in May 2022. The reason for this was the platform we were using, Live365, was great in many ways but ended up becoming quite expensive yet still didn’t do exactly what we wanted so we decided to pull the plug on that solution and in May, the site changed to load a random show from the SOF Radio archive every time you visited the site instead.
Since then, we have began looking again at options but this time without using any type of platform and instead opting for a custom built solution and are pleased to say we are making some progress and are quite far on with it.
If you check the home page of the site you are currently looking on (Click here) you will see the top banner has now changed and has a ‘Now Playing’ section where it specifies the show name and genre underneath (at the time of writing we are enjoying some great trance music with the ‘In a Trance’ show) Previously there was also a player fixed to the bottom of every page, that is now gone in favour of engaging users to go to the ‘Listen’ page that you can get to by hitting ‘Listen Now’ in that top banner or clicking the red link in the top menu on every page.
The main reason for opening the ‘Listen Now’ page in another tab was following on from user feedback where users were reporting that when they clicked the player to tune in and browsed through the site pages, as soon as a new page was loaded the player would of course stop playing (obvious really, just an oversight on our part) Opening it in a new tab means it will remain open and playing in the background.
The way the player works is similar to before as in, it is fully automated and still loads from a random selection of shows but it now sticks to a schedule so you’ll see the Schedule page is now back here with an updated, more simplified schedule. Over time this may change but for now, I am keeping things as simple as possible whilst we are in development. In order to create a continuous flow of music we opted to refresh the page automatically on the hour every hour. The one downside to this is that there will be quite an abrupt end to a track when the page refreshes but as the player will automatically then kick in with another track, this cushions the blow. Besides, there is unfortunately no way around this given the source is Mixcloud.
Listening on a mobile
When tuning in via a mobile you will notice the music will not start playing automatically like it does when listening on a laptop or desktop machine. This is a browser restriction more than anything else and no browser will autoplay a music player, it’s just the way of the world unfortunately and there are no clever coding hacks to get around this so you’ll just have to hit the ‘Play’ icon.
The SOF App
We are still testing the hourly auto refresh on the app itself, if you are using the app and find that the page doesn’t refresh on the hour, like it does in a normal browser, for now please just hit refresh manually. You don’t need to do this on the hour but as each show in the cycle is around 2 hours long, if you listen to a complete show you will be met with silence once it’s finished as there is no way for us to automatically start another show, this is why we use the refresh hack and by doing it on the hour it ensures a non-stop 24 hour cycle of tunes.
We definitely think the best way to tune into SOF Radio is via the app, you can find out more information on the app, and how to install it, here When you see the prompt to allow notifications make sure you hit ‘Yes’ or ‘OK’ so that we can keep you updated with SOF Radio updates and new features.
So as you can see, things are up and running again so tune in and enjoy. There’ll be more updates as and when they happen.
Stay tuned…
