LRH Enterprises

I updated the WeathGet program to output a new file, WAUDIO.TXT, which is used by MP3JoinerSA to build a verbal weather report. It breaks down the individual bits of the weather report into words or phrases which can be appended together to form an audio file.

Here’s a sample of the WeathGet WAUDIO.TXT file:

WeathGet creates the file list from the weather report, automatically creating entries for before and after each word or phrase, and before and after the complete report. In this sample, only the words “Today”, “Mostly Cloudy”, “High”, “75”, “Low”, and “65” came from the weather.

All these audio clips do not have to exist. (The joiner skips it if not found.) The inclusion of these extra files allow you to customize (somewhat) your vocal weather report. Most of the before and after clips could be a clip of “silence” just to space things out.

At WUMD, we’re using the BeforeWeather clip, and the condition, high, low, temp and aftertemp clips. I’m currently not using the day or any of the other before or after clips. I recorded all the different temperatures from “0” to “110”, “high”, “low” and multiple difference phrases like “mostly sunny” into separate sound clips (all mp3) in a dedicated directory.  The aftertemp clip simply says ‘degrees’. The joiner is instructed to look in that directory for the clips. Other WUMD DJs will be able to record all the same clips, stored in a separate path, and then the weather will have an alternate voice.

The “/Comment” line is used by the joiner to fill the resultant file’s ID3 comment field.

MP3JoinerSA is a command line stand alone version of MP3Joiner. It takes several parameters telling it which files to join into a single mp3 file. Read all about it on the site.

Used in conjuction with OMTAC, we can now automatically build a weather audio report, and load it into the OMT automation to be played each hour. It’s all done on a schedule, and with a batch file.

First, the regular WeathGet schedule is maintained, just replace with the newer version of WeathGet which creates the WAUDIO.TXT file.

Second, the schedule is set to run a new batch file, shown below, three minutes after WeathGet is run. That leaves a little leeway if things are slow.

The essence of the batch file:

cd \weather
WeathGet
MP3Joiner /input:waudio.txt /idir:larryhoubre /output:wth.mp3
omtac /cat:utl /id:W{WWW} /file:wth.mp3

I’m not showing all the nitty gritty of the batch file, you need to fill in your own directory paths and such to get each program to run. The essence shows calling the weather getter program, then the joiner to build the audio clip, and omtac to insert the clip into the automation system. See articles here elsewhere about the use of the individual programs.

As you can see from the example file, I have it only output the weather information for the current day. I will probably add a configuration option later to allow the output of more than one day. Also needed is an option to group files together in a what that if one of the files is missing, none of the group will be joined in the output. For example, if ‘today’ is missing, the ‘beforetoday’ and ‘aftertoday’ files would be skipped.

We don’t usually get “below zero” temperatures around here, so I’m not sure yet how to handle a temperature of “-1” or below. I’ll just wait until it’s needed to worry about it.