IP Radio - broadcasting within scheduled time periods

[wymcol]

I am setting up an IP Radio station within our college. I have setup a tidy little studio where the mp3 will be encoded. Students save their pods to a shared folder.

I have installed ShoutCAST on a server within the college. The server reboots ever weekend. When it starts up it launches a playlist in its startup folder. I add current pods to this playlist from the shared network folder.

Students and teachers can listen to the stream from any workstation in the college by clicking a hyper link on the intranet page. Additionally we are playing the radio from speakers from various pcs within the college. These pcs are only to play at break and lunch times.

I have built an XP SP2 machine that I will use to play the url at certain times of day. I have set the machine up to automatically login and put a playlist file with the url of the shoutcast server within the startup folder.

Obviously this means that the radio will loop throughout the day. Since I only want the radio to play at certain times in the day I tried using scheduled tasks to launch mediaplayer but I can't seem to add an end time for my programs. Does anyone have experience with scheduled tasks? If so how do I add an end time? Is there another method that I could use?

[wymcol]

screenshot of scheduled task advanced options. Where's the end time option?

[SteveT]

Schtasks.exe ???

How to use Schtasks.exe to Schedule Tasks in Windows Server 2003

[wymcol]

Although ShoutCAST is running on a 2k3 machine my 'listener' machine is XPSP2. I want the shoutcast server to be up and running all the time (except when the machien reboots) so the service will be available all the time but my listener machine will only play the music through speakers at lunch and break.

[robk]

Time switch in the power to the speakers?

Very simple, and if the machine is doing nothing else sound wise would work.

RobK

[powdarrmonkey]

In the screenshot that you've posted you need to edit Advanced Options and tell it to terminate after a set time.

[wymcol]

In the screenshot that you've posted you need to edit Advanced Options and tell it to terminate after a set time.

I did take a look at those options but they seem to be for ending the task.

Perhaps with the options Im posting in my screen grab I can achieve my goal. Let me know if you think they're correct.

[SYNACK]

I did take a look at those options but they seem to be for ending the task.

Perhaps with the options Im posting in my screen grab I can achieve my goal. Let me know if you think they're correct.

I think that you will need to make sure that the "If this task is still running...." checkbox is ticked but other than that this setup should work fine.

[wymcol]

I can't understand why the Every field needs to be greater than the duration. Doesn't make sense to me.

[SYNACK]

I can't understand why the Every field needs to be greater than the duration. Doesn't make sense to me.

I'm not sure I get you meaning, I did find something that I missed though. If it is set as in your image above it will only run once as it has an end date, you would probably want to remove that.

As you have it now it just sets the task to run once every 24hours from the start time for a period of 20 minutes and then if the player is still running (which it should be) kills the task.

[SYNACK]

Personally I would do it this way (illustrated in attachments) which should do the same thing but is a little more configurable as it will only run on week days.

You could even set the pc to go to standby and this task would wake it up to perform it.

[wymcol]

Personally I would do it this way

Thanks buddy. I think I needed some spoon feeding.